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Five years of dithering, one year of refining, three years of reassessing, and still no actual decision has been made – just hopes of one to come soon. Meanwhile, the Army must somehow do without. Trucks may not have the cool factor of a shiny new jet or a deadly tank, but they are absolutely vital pieces of military equipment. Whether in war zones or disaster areas, at home or abroad, trucks haul the gear that allows our soldiers to get their jobs done. Bullets, beans, bandages, diesel – all of it is carried by trucks. Logistics is what keeps the modern military machine running, even in peacetime. More often than not, that means trucks.

Of course, the trucks might have been delivered long ago, had the government made procurement, rather than jobs for the boys, the priority. There’s no worldwide shortage of trucks, after all. If the army needed trucks, the government could have bought them off the shelf from any one of a number of international suppliers. But that would have required putting the needs of the military ahead of the needs of the Canadian defence industry, and the legions of economic nationalists ready to take up their cause.

Several years ago, the Conservative government, in a rare fit of economic sense, contracted with the American automotive company Navistar to provide 1,300 urgently needed medium-duty transport vehicles – essentially, a conventional commercial truck, with some modifications. The contract blew up in the government’s face when it was announced the company was laying off hundreds of workers at an Ontario factory. Peter MacKay, then the minister of national defence, was forced to defend sending Canadian money to an American company that was laying off Canadians. It would be Canadians who maintained the trucks, MacKay said. The tires on the trucks would be Canadian made. And they’d, uh, run on fuel pumped from Canadian stations. (Yes, he actually said that.)