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That’s not what we’ve been getting. First, it was the Conservatives, who systematically understated the jets’ true lifetime costs until they were called out on it by the parliamentary budget officer and the auditor general. Now, it is Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s turn.

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On the weekend, Trudeau said he would free up cash for Canada’s desperately underfunded navy by “cancelling” our F-35 purchase. There is, in fact, no purchase to cancel — the Tories put the entire procurement process on hold years ago, pending a reboot that has yet to materialize. Yet in the same breath, Trudeau pledged he would replace the “cancelled” F-35 with another plane. So where would the money for the navy come from? Perhaps a more “open and transparent” competition than the notorious sole-sourcing of the F-35 would obtain more value for money, but the overall savings are likely to be small; most of the cost of the planes is in operations, which are common to all. But — perhaps the most jarring disjunction — how can a process be truly competitive, when one of the primary competitors has been explicitly ruled out from the start?

It was, in short, an incoherent mess of a position. But Conservative Leader Stephen Harper wasted little time matching it. The prime minister leapt to the defence of the F-35 — which his government, recall, has officially shelved — and spent far more time talking about the possible benefits to Canadian industry than the military case for the F-35 as the most cost-effective option. This is in keeping with a long and dishonourable bipartisan tradition of treating procurement as a backdoor jobs creation program, rather than a government’s solemn obligation to properly equip the citizens it sends into harm’s way.

Indeed, it fell to the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair, of all people, to say the obvious: that Canada needs fighter jets, that we need a truly open and competitive process to find the best fit for our needs and that the Liberal bias against the F-35 was as much in contradiction to this as the Conservatives’ bias in favour.

Has it come to this? Has procurement policy become so comically chaotic, so distorted by political considerations, that we must look to the NDP to sort it out?

National Post