Type 26 GCS - CSC

CSC Jobs and Industrial Benefits: Pugliese on a Roll!?

Dan Middlemiss, 16 December 2020.

Here we go again! From his voluminous collection of interviews and Access To Information (ATI) documents, David Pugliese has just published two more articles questioning the scope and value of the proposed Industry and Technological Benefits (ITB) flowing from the CSC project [1].

There are interesting revelations here about the behind-the-scenes infighting between contractors and government officials about the Ottawa’s approach to infusing greater ‘Canadian Content’ into the CSC process. Pugliese is always good when he is showing that not everything is as it appears under Ottawa’s National Shipbuilding Strategy (NSS).

But what is Pugliese really up to in the series of long articles he has recently published? I suspect that Pugliese is ‘chumming the waters’ – to use a fishing phrase – in an effort to attract the ‘sharks’ of critics and outright opponents of the CSC project as it is currently conceived. The timing of these articles is telling. Pugliese may be trying to draw attention to what he perceives to be serious flaws in the CSC project before the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) releases his report on the latest cost projections of for the CSC – sure to be a large and controversial sum – next February, and before the run-up to a possible spring 2021 federal election.

No question there is a bias at play here, but Pugliese knows all too well that once the CSC contract is signed, it will be too late to alter the course of the project in any significant way after the fact.

I predict there will be much more to come from Pugliese on the topic of CSC.

References

  1. David Pugliese, “$70 billion warship project promised thousands of jobs, but who knows how many will be delivered?”, Ottawa Citizen, (14 December 2020). [Accessed at: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/70-billion-warship-project-promised-thousands-of-jobs-but-who-knows-how-many-will-be-delivered]; and David Pugliese, “Top of the line Canadian-made naval equipment shut out of $70-billion warship program”, Ottawa Citizen, (16 December 2020). [Accessed at: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/top-of-the-line-canadian-made-naval-equipment-shut-out-of-70-billion-warship-program]

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