The National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy (NSPS) is a bad policy. Still, when it recently was offered a lifeline off this sinking barge of a program, the government promptly rearranged the deck chairs and listened to the band play on.

Look, I grew up in Nova Scotia and love the idea of shipbuilders across the country having a more or less guaranteed stream of work for the next 50 years. And watching the Irving yard in Halifax roll out the first two super-blocks of the first Arctic Offshore Patrol Ship (AOPS) HMCS Harry DeWolfe this summer was unquestionably impressive — and somehow seemed quite natural.

Sir John A. Macdonald’s National Policy – which ultimately destroyed Atlantic Canada’s shipbuilding industry, which depended on north/south rather than east/west trade — was about building a country, sure. But it was also about winning votes. It was a sort of panacea politics: a single solution to a range of problems across the country, not unlike the NSPS of today. The two policies ultimately will end up sharing the same fate — of not living up to their authors’ advertisements.

The NSPS’s stated dual function was to replace the Royal Canadian Navy’s aging, nearly rusted-out fleet and to provide a steady work stream for shipyards across the country (two large ones in particular) for a generation. Trouble is, it always seemed unlikely that both could be accomplished at the same time — certainly not at the best price for taxpayers.

Call me Catholic but, as with most things, there seems to be a trinity of issues here: domestic jobs, building the fleet the navy needs, and the cost to taxpayers. It seems impossible that any one solution could satisfy all three concerns.

In other words, you can build the fleet the navy needs at the best cost to taxpayers — but you can’t do it while providing the number of domestic jobs you want. Or you can have the fleet the navy needs and provide all those domestic jobs — but it’s going to cost a multiple of what it otherwise would.

The latter course is the one the previous government chose to take. Two shipyards (Irving on the east coast, Seaspan on the west) were chosen as the official contractors for the NSPS. Several other yards were selected to do smaller projects around the country, including yards on the Great Lakes.

But here’s the rub: governments suck both at building and buying stuff. They call it ‘procurement’; it’s usually anything but. Remember the Sea King helicopters? The Mulroney government wanted to replace them with EH-101s in 1992. The feds are more or less just getting around to it now. Efficiency at its finest.

One important thing that separates Canadian procurement from the way it’s done by every other NATO ally is that in Canada, it’s completely divorced from the military itself. While every other NATO country (as well as Australia, New Zealand, etc.) does its procurement via a department within the military, Canada offloads the entire process (apart from the development of specifications) to Public Works, which then basically uses the same process to buy fighter jets that it uses to buy staplers.

Take the replacement of the fleet’s Auxiliary Oilers and Replenishers (AORs), a critical part of the NSPS. As the floating gas stations and grocery stores of the RCN, they’re the backbone of the fleet; without them, other vessels can’t deploy to far-off destinations. They’re also some of the simplest designs in the NSPS program: a floating gas can that’s nowhere near as complicated as the big prize in this scramble, the Canadian Surface Combatant (CSC) intended to replace the destroyers and frigates of the fleet.

There are a half dozen designs for AORs floating around the world serving NATO allies. Each of them is in service, in production and currently fulfilling this critical role with a friendly fleet. You would think that would make the process pretty easy: pick one, build it, give the fleet back an essential service.

Given the fact the budget has already doubled and the uncertainty of the timelines, the government had an obligation to give the FREMM offer more than the cursory consideration it seems to have received. Given the fact the budget has already doubled and the uncertainty of the timelines, the government had an obligation to give the FREMM offer more than the cursory consideration it seems to have received.

But no. Instead, the process has taken so long (the first boat is scheduled to be in service 2021-ish, the second in 2022 and even more ‘ish’) that earlier this year the government recognized the need to fill the capability gap immediately. A Liberian freighter has been converted into what will be known as HMCS Resolve by the Davie yard of Quebec. The expectation is that Resolve will be in service well into the 2020s — more than a decade after the NSPS was announced and replacing the AORs was identified as a top priority.

Again, the AORs ought to be the easy part. The complexities of a modern war-fighting ship like the CSC will be exponentially greater: sensors, weapons systems, helicopters, radar — all of which need to be compatible with allied fleets around the world, not to mention our own fleet’s other assets.

So with the budget for the program now more or less doubled (as of November 2015 the government admitted the costs were at 181 per cent of the original budget; one assumes we’re well over 200 per cent by now), the submissions for the CSC were supposed to be received by government by the end of last month.

Industry has complained pretty loudly about the seemingly unnecessary bureaucratic complexities of the program for some time. But last month, a group representing a French and Italian consortium producing the FREMM frigate design decided to try and short-circuit the process by going directly to Defence Minister Harjit Sajaan with the help of their home countries.

Disclosure: I did some work for DCNS — one of the companies involved in the FREMM design — many years ago on another project. But from that experience and others, I learned how other countries do their procurement work and it completely explains this approach.

In France, for example, the Direction générale de l’armement (the DGA) is not only a wing within the French military, it’s also the agency that both buys product for the French military and sells to other countries offshore on behalf of French industry. This makes the DGA the centre of the arms industry in France. Its authority within and without government is absolute and it operates abroad as an organ of the state in every French embassy in the world.

Now, I’m not for a minute suggesting that Canada should adopt this model. Certainly the debacle surrounding the sale of light armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia last year made it clear that Canadians have little appetite for being in the international arms business.

But for those in the arms business in a serious way, spending too much to build boats that could be readily bought off the shelf for far less makes no sense; it’s anathema to the international market. Countries like France almost certainly assumed Public Works wasn’t serious about such a rigid, arms-length process because, in almost every other country in the world, when a government is spending billions of dollars on national defence, it’s usually more interested in getting the best possible deal than in upholding a set of arbitrary rules.

We have been told that the proposal from the FREMM proponents (government-to-government, as opposed to business-to-government) was that they would provide Canada with the number of vessels required for a fixed price of $32 billion. The FREMM is in service with the French and Italian navies, as well as the Moroccans and Egyptians, with plans to compete in the United States, Greece and Australia as well. This was a serious offer from a serious competitor with lots of experience — who judged the established process in Canada to be somewhere between inefficient and impossible.

So back to the virtuous triangle: as Canadian citizens and taxpayers we need to have a military that is properly equipped for the job at a cost that isn’t being unnecessarily inflated by politics or bureaucracy. As things stand right now, Seaspan has the AOR and a number of Coast Guard projects, the Irvings are well along with two of the projected six Arctic Offshore Patrol Ship boats, Davie has managed to creatively insert itself by providing one temporary AOR (and should be commissioned to provide a second as soon as possible) and smaller boats are being built at yards around the country.

That’s expensive, but investments have been made and the work has begun, so let’s leave those programs alone. CSC, however, was always going to be the most costly piece of the program by a nautical mile.

Given the fact the budget has already doubled, the uncertainty of the timelines, the complexity of the requirements and the risk (really, the certainty) of further surprises between now and the time the first boat hits the water, the government had an obligation to give the FREMM offer more than the cursory consideration it seems to have received.

It might not be popular politics and it might require some legal backpeddling with those who did follow the procurement process, but leaving the existing programs in place for the smaller projects and securing the most expensive boats on a fixed-price basis is almost certainly the only way to cover all three sides of the triangle.

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