EDITORIAL: Auditor general targets spending on fighter jets

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Be alarmed. Be very alarmed.

A day after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced he will invest billions of new taxpayer dollars to meet Canada’s NATO target of spending 2% of our gross domestic product (GDP) on defence, a scathing report by the auditor general reveals massive cost overruns in the government’s plan to modernize Canada’s aging fleet of fighter jets.

Karen Hogan reported Tuesday that the cost of buying 88 F-35 fighter jets to replace Canada’s aging fleet of CF-18s — estimated at $19 billion in 2022 because the government used outdated information — had increased by almost 50% to $27.7 billion by 2024.

That’s without including the added costs of building essential infrastructure — now more than three years behind schedule — and purchasing advanced weaponry to make the F-35s fully operational, which Hogan said will add at least $5.5 billion more to the final price tag.

The fighter jet program also faces a shortage of qualified pilots, despite being warned about that issue in a 2018 report by the auditor general.

Hogan said some of the government’s cost increases were unavoidable due to inflation, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates and supply chain shortages caused by the 2020 global pandemic.

But others were caused by government failures.

“National Defence’s approach to managing risks … had weaknesses, lacking proactive measures to minimize the impact of potential threats and the project did not have robust contingency plans,” Hogan concluded.

Adding to the uncertainty is that Carney has ordered a review on whether Canada should purchase all 88 American-made fighter jets or consider possible alternatives such as European-made fighter jets.

Defence Minister David McGuinty gave the standard government boilerplate response to the auditor general’s findings, saying the government accepts the auditor general’s recommendations and will implement some by Sept. 30 and others by Nov. 30.

Which means that, as is the standard operating procedure in responses to critical auditor general reports these days, the same people who created the problems will now be trusted to fix them.

That’s disturbing in the context of the massive amount of new spending Carney has promised in order to hit Canada’s NATO target of committing 2% of Canada’s GDP annually to defence spending, starting during this fiscal year, which ends on March 31, 2026, compared to 1.4% last year.

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