Posted on 05/12/2003 9:48:39 AM PDT by knighthawk
Canada's Sea King helicopters are hovering dinosaurs. Actually, they do not hover much: The 1950s-era aircraft require 30 hours of maintenance for every one hour of flight. Earlier this year, a Sea King crashed on the deck of a Canadian warship, the latest in a long series of snafus. Last week, Canada's maritime helicopter program was again at the centre of a government controversy. According to documents revealed last week by the National Post, the tendering process for the $2.5-billion purchase of 28 new helicopters seems to have been manipulated to favour a French manufacturer.
The original technical specifications for the Sea King's replacements were drafted by the military officials whose pilots will fly them in combat and on coastal rescue missions. Because the Sea King's replacements must be able to function safely far out at sea, military officials say Canada needs a helicopter that can maintain altitude even without full engine power -- so our choppers can return safely to shore in the event an engine fails. In addition, it should be capable of carrying all the equipment it needs for different missions. When disaster strikes, minutes count; and our helicopters should be able to respond to an emergency immediately without a delay for reconfiguration.
A French company, Eurocopter Canada Ltd., hopes its model will be selected by Ottawa. But that helicopter has only two engines, and so would likely not be able to maintain altitude if an engine conks out. It also has less capacity to carry rescue and military equipment than the more robust three-engine model offered by its Anglo-Italian competitor, Cormorant.
But what the French model gives up in the air it apparently makes up in smoke-filled rooms. As the Post's Andrew McIntosh has disclosed, officials from Eurocopter and the French government met Raymond Chrétien, Canada's ambassador to France, in 2001 to lobby for changes to the stated operation requirements of Canada's new helicopters. In a development we find disturbing, Canada's ambassador subsequently sent off a diplomatic note, labelled "SECRET," to his uncle, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, emphasizing the allegedly high political and commercial importance attached to Eurocopter's concerns. Within weeks of the meeting, Canadian defence officials changed the technical specifications for the replacement helicopters and a Eurocopter representative was, documents confirm, "provided the opportunity to review the revised wording" of the specifications. As a former Sea King fleet commander recently wrote, the process to replace the Sea Kings has been so infected by politics that it now ranks as an "abject failure."
Clearly it is wrong -- as a matter of both business and politics -- to allow a company bidding on a contract to participate in formulating the product requirements embedded in that contract. But there is something far more important at stake: the lives that depend on Canada's ability to participate in military operations and perform search and rescue operations at sea. It would be a disgrace if Canadian soldiers and maritime travellers were put at risk because a smooth-talking group of corporate lobbyists from France convinced our government to dumb down its requirements for a vital piece of hardware.
This is a common practice. Not necessarily bad, you have to have some strong managers running the process. That said, this is the type of thing that IBM got sued for over government computing contracts in the late 60's.
Who just happens to be Jean's nephew...
Yup. And everytime I was involved in specing out the contract for the prospective customer, we got the contract - but those were with private companies, not government customers. A government procurement process should not operate this way.
Keeping company representatives completely out of that loop logically leads to the case where the specs can't be met by anyone, or can be met by an inferior product which can win the bid on first cost alone, leaving the buyer with high operating costs and/or far less than the most effective capability available.
It will take us years if not decades to undo the damage this Liberal idiot has inflicted on this country, if ever. Stupid b*stard Chretien. I hate him.
In such case blue-sky specs make no sense at all. You just have to put a dollar amount on whatever you think each capability on offer is worth--and make an eyes-open case that one vendor or the other should be given the contract. And take the political heat for whatever political motives may consequently be imputed to you.
"Perfect" acquisition is illusory; you can easily pay more in the cost of evaluating proposals than the contract is worth in total. I think of the occasion when an engineer needed, for government project, a model of a particular airplane. His choices were to pay for the model out of his own pocket or to wait a few months for the procurement process to get the "low bid." Even though an hour of the engineer's time was worth more than the model . . .
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