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The national defence department spent upward of $22.7-million buying cluster bombs that Ottawa now says it wants to ban and destroy at a cost of another $2-million — a job that will inevitably be outsourced because no Canadian company is capable of disposing of the controversial weapons, the National Post has learned.

The Canadian Forces never used any of the 12,600 projectiles it purchased for between $1,500 and $1,800 each in 1988. Today, the stockpile is sitting at the Canadian Forces Ammunition Depot in Dundurn, Sask., while Ottawa waits for a firm to step up to the job of destroying the projectiles and the more than one million bomblets they contain.

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[np-related]

“That’s money that’s gone that we’re never going to see again,” said Derek Fildebrandt, national research director at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “It’s a positive thing, though, that we never had to use them.”

The projectile in question is particularly controversial.