"Tories OK Liberal military buys"
"$2B fleet of ships among purchases planned by Grits". The headline and the sub-head of a story in which reporter David Pugliese of the Ottawa Citizen desperately defends the Liberals.
Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor's announcement that the Harper government was going to spend more than $2 billion on a fleet of new supply transport ships for the navy is a case of deja vu of the first order.Fine and good. This is what the military has said it needed, not the Liberals. And the Liberals never actually bought one thing on the list.
In April 2004, then-prime minister Paul Martin launched the same program, with Liberal defence minister David Pratt announcing the exact details Mr. O'Connor outlined yesterday in Halifax...
...now, in a savvy public relations move, the Conservative government has embraced the Joint Support Ship program as its own, highlighting it as evidence of its commitment to rebuild the Canadian Forces...
Several of the military equipment announcements by the Conservative government over the next few days may be equally familiar.
Today in Valcartier, Que., it will announce the purchase of a new fleet of trucks, also originally outlined in the Liberals' defence policy paper last April, albeit with few details. The same goes for the plan to buy new medium-lift helicopters, an acquisition process the Harper government is to release tomorrow in Edmonton.
On Thursday, the Conservatives will announce the procurement of tactical airlift planes. Last fall, the Martin Liberals announced the same $5-billion program to buy a replacement for the aging Hercules aircraft, but didn't get far into the project before losing the January federal election.
The Harper government differs from its Liberal predecessor when it comes to long-range military transport planes. The Liberals decided those were too expensive to buy, especially since such aircraft could be quickly leased or obtained from NATO when needed...
posted by Mark, Ottawa at 12:23 p.m.
9 Comments:
Mark, it should be pointed out that the CPC hasn't bought anything yet either
Agreed, Cameron. And I'll believe it all happens when there are displacement holes in the water and wheels on the ground to match the lofty words.
Not that I don't trust the Conservatives to follow through, but previous Conservative governments have lousy track records.
Partisan comment for a partisan post.
dave: I admit to a touch of the partisan here, but my posts have often been critical of the Conservatives (Arctic icebreakers!) so...
Mark
Ottawa
Observor69: Not quite. All Graham got approval for was $4.6 billion for a Herc replacement. A broader $12.1 billion plan was shot down earlier in November last year.
http://www.canada.com/national/story.html?id=d1d91e61-974d-4f66-bf86-fe16e73b126f
Mark
Ottawa
Observer, do you believe that Hillier doesnt want C-17's? There somthing the military has been for a long long time, likely dating back to the days before we sold our Chinooks.
Observer there are many problems with the An-124. Some of which include their avionics are nothing like anything else in the CF, they would have to be maintained through ex-soviet countries, there no longer even in producion, there producers are poor, and on top of everything, there old, and already overused. What the CF doesnt need is old pieces of outdated equiptment. On top of this the C-17 will likely serve the CF for so long, as these sorts of planes seem to, that the price in the long run wont be that much higher then the ex-Soviet piece of trash.
"If anything can be said, this Government DOES what it SAYS IT WILL DO . . . their track record is 100% so far." Not to stray to far from the specific, narrowed topic of this blog, but that is a debatable statement.
add to that - CF will have An-124 access via SALIS (NATO contract Canada is paying into).
I don't blame Skylink for trying to keep their business but C-17 is a different beast than AN-124 - smaller but capable of operation from shorter fields (down to 900m runway length I think) - in a disaster situation you could probably put one down on Toronto Island. It can also operate on rough strips - 124 can't. Why should CF buy capability it's already committed to time-sharing?
To get back on topic, it is not as though the Liberals have not tried to make political points by re-announcing spending. How many times have we heard them trumpeting a budget that contained spending announcements that had been made in previous budgets.
When it comes to military spending by the Liberals, we are still waiting (3 years is it?) for the new mobile gun systems to give our troops a direct fire capability with heavy weapons.
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