OTTAWA – If any politician is looking forward to the upcoming parliamentary battle over the F-35 fighter jets, it’s got to be former fly boy Laurie Hawn.
“You know what? I’m a fighter pilot,” the Conservative MP for Edmonton Centre said in an interview. “If they want me to talk about fighters, I can do that until the cows come home.”
Government and opposition MPs will set the stage Wednesday for a prolonged parliamentary battle over Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s pledge to buy 65 F-35 aircraft for $9 billion, plus another $7 billion or more for maintenance.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay and Industry Minister Tony Clement are among a dozen witnesses in the hot seat during daylong hearings on the F-35s Wednesday at the House of Commons defence committee.
“This is just the opening confrontation,” New Brunswick MP Dominic LeBlanc, newly appointed defence critic in Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff’s shadow cabinet, said in an interview. “We intend to make this a hot issue this fall.”
Hawn, MacKay’s parliamentary secretary and a defence committee member, was the first Canadian fighter pilot qualified to fly the CF-18 solo in November 1982, when the first planes were delivered to Cold Lake, Alta.
Nearly three decades later, with opposition MPs campaigning against the way the Conservative government is handling the plan to replace Canada’s CF-18 fleet with F-35s, the retired CF-18 squadron commander hears an echo.
“There’s so many parallels,” Hawn said. “It’s frankly the same type of focus, exactly the same things that were said 30 years ago about the F-18 program and that’s been a very successful program.”
The focus now is on whether Canada’s military really needs this particular Lockheed-Martin aircraft or should hold an open competition with other planes; whether the F-35s are too expensive; whether Canadian industry will get enough of the associated contracts; and whether Canada can afford them.
The then-Liberal government of Jean Chretien signed Canada up in 1997 to the U.S.-led “Joint Strike Fighter” program to develop a new generation of fighters. Seven other countries now are in that program: the U.K., Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, Italy, Turkey and Australia.
The American idea was to invite allies in at the concept stage and encourage them to buy the plane that was eventually designed, lowering cost of production and increasing interoperability among allied forces. Lockheed-Martin, hopes to sell about 5,000 of the fighters, more than half to the U.S.
While in the program, neither Chretien nor Paul Martin’s subsequent Liberal government committed to buying any of the planes, even after Lockheed-Martin won the design competition over rival Boeing in 2001.
That commitment did not take place until this July when Harper announced the plan to purchase with delivery starting by 2016. No contract has been signed and the planes are not yet coming off the production line.
An April 2010 Congressional Research Service report said “the F-35 program is behind schedule and over budget” and the Pentagon said the cost of building the jet has more than doubled from a decade ago to as much as $113 million US per plane. The Pentagon last week asked Lockheed-Martin to get costs down.
A library of Parliament report to MPs in 2002 said the planes would cost less than $50 million. The $9 billion figure cited by Harper for 65 planes puts the price at nearly $139 million each, but Hawn says only 60-65 per cent of that is the air frame itself, and the rest will be for weapons, simulators, training, and infrastructure.
Ignatieff says Canada cannot afford the plane at a time when the country’s deficit is more than $50 billion, but the government argues that payments won’t start until 2015, when the budget is balanced. The delivery and payment period would be 2015-22.
The Liberals joined the Joint Strike Fighter program at the behest of Canadian industry and the Conservative government says that withdrawing from the program would cut Canadian aerospace and other industry from access to bidding on F-35 contracts worth up to $12 billion.
Lockheed-Martin spokesman John Kent said in an interview: “If an F-35 partner country were to drop out of the program, the existing contracts would be honoured to their conclusion. But because industrial participation opportunities are provided to program partners or F-35 customers, any future work would be competed and placed among industry in those partner countries.”
Leblanc says the Conservatives are talking “fairy tale potential” and have no guarantees of regional industrial benefits that are traditionally nailed down in contracts won through a competitive bidding process.
“We are very, very worried about the non-competitive process,” he said. “The largest purchase in Canadian history is sole-sourced. That to us is very alarming.”
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