By Dan Middlemiss, 25 January 2024
CSC Costs: Is This All We Get?
Dan Middlemiss
David Pugliese reveals that Ken Rubin, a longstanding Access to Information user, recently received nearly 1,700 pages dealing with the specific costs and work done on the CSC to date.[1] Trouble is, most of the response by DND to Rubin’s April 2021 request for files, is heavily redacted – as Rubin said, “I pretty much got nearly 1,700 blank pages”. In fact, Rubin stated that there was not a single cost figure in any of these pages. No details on what Canadian taxpayers had spent thus far, and nothing on the work Irving Shipbuilding has done for these taxpayer dollars, and Irving’s annual profit was censored.
Irving refused to comment; the office of the current Minister of National Defence, Bill Blair, released a statement declaring that “the minister believes strongly in openness and transparency”.
DND apparently also claimed that, when consulted by government officials as to whether the records contained proprietary information, Irving objected to the release of the documents. Pugliese noted that Rubin contends that DND does not have to accede to Irving’s wishes because the amount of tax dollars spent on the CSC and how it is spent should not be secret.
In addition, DND apparently told the Ottawa Citizen that the documents had taken so long to be released because Rubin had requested 20 years of records. Rubin denied this, and DND later acknowledged, without explanation, that its contention was not true.
So, we are left to ask whether or not DND still intends to produce an updated costing for the CSC. In the meantime, secrecy and prevarication still rule in Canada’s Orwellian State.
[1]. David Pugliese, “Unprecedented level of secrecy surrounds costs and work on $89B warship project,” Ottawa Citizen, 24 January 2024. See, https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/unprecedented-level-of-secrecy-surrounds-costs-and-work-on-80b-warship-project
9 thoughts on “CSC Costs: Is This All We Get?”
I thought it was a matter of time before David Pugliese published another biased article on the CSC. I usually take stuff that he posts along with articles by Ken Hansen and other naval “experts” with a grain of salt. That being said I hold little interest in statements from someone who makes his living sending in access to information requests trying to embarrass the government under the guise of freedom of information.
I know that many and probably yourself think that the government is trying to hide something by redacting information about the build costs and the old “its the tax payers’ money” argument. Personally I believe that the government in matters of defence and procurement have instances where they need to withhold some information, and this is in fact a case of that and I don’t blame the prime contractor either. This is another nothing sandwich from the Defence Watch with lots of accusations but few verifiable facts.
I tend to agree Retired RCN, it is very disappointing that many of the members of the media who seemingly specialize in covering the Canadian Military have such skewed opinions. The constant stream of doom and gloom articles from all sides very much slants the viewpoint of any less informed parties looking from the outside inwards, even without talking about the disdain specifically pointed towards the CSC program. As with this article, context is often removed and claims which look shocking to outsiders are pushed to get a message across. I wish we could have more honest and unbiased discussions in the mainstream media regarding the CSC but it seems such a thing has been doomed for years.
Good morning Jimmy and Retired,
You make excellent points. Thank you.
Ubique,
Les
To begin with a disclosure, as a former academic I find it difficult to discuss notions of liberal and free democracy and rationality-based arguments with those who believe that, in areas such as national defence, Canadians should accept that secrecy and lack of transparency should govern most matters related to military procurement.
I am intrigued by the idea that the analysis of journalists such as David Pugliese should be placed in context. On what, exactly, is this ‘context’ to be founded? DND media releases? OK, if that is the case, when was the last time DND provided an explanation for its still current estimated project cost of $56-60B for the CSC? This cost estimate was first announced in 2019 before any of the many changes that have apparently been made to the original CSC parent design, and before Covid-19, supply chain bottlenecks, and higher than initially projected rates of inflation have hit shipbuilding sectors here in Canada and around the world. In addition, this 2019 cost range was provided with no supporting data or explanation whatsoever. DND stated last fall that it would provide an updated CSC costing before the end of 2023, but no sign as yet and we still wait.
For those in the ‘trust DND’ school, recall that Pugliese also recently released the $500M jump within a single year in the total cost of the two Canadian Coast Guard patrol ships being constructed by Irving. This time, appropriate excuses were offered as reported by Pugliese, but one still has to wonder why such a large single year cost growth has occurred in Canada, when major naval shipbuilding projects – take the Constellation-class frigates in the US for example – have not encountered similarly large cost increases. (Conspiracy minded people still believe that the US government is hiding the real cost of those warships, despite no evidence that this is the case, and with plenty of independent organizations closely monitoring the project).
Finally, while I do not want to impugn the integrity of all government agencies all of the time, there have been infamous cases in Canada, especially when very large sums of government funds are at stake, that Ottawa has strayed from the straight and narrow. Look no further than today’s headlines about the Procurement Ombudsman’s reported 76% of ArriveCan suppliers who provided no work whatsoever on their contracts. Or should we go back to the case of Ottawa’s long gun firearms registry plan, which went from a projected $2M total cost to a $2B cost.
So, yes, by all means subject Pugliese’s frequently over-the-top excesses in reporting to careful scrutiny, but please recall that he remains the only full-time defence journalist in Canada, and that Ottawa and our shipbuilders have been consistent ‘no shows’ when it comes to providing ‘context’ or meaningful, updated information about the CSC and other major projects. And, yes, as a taxpayer, I do want to know where and how my taxes are being spent.
Dan, et al –
To add to the above, sometimes Mr. Pugliese is his own enemy. He has repeatedly reported that the CSC program has ballooned from an estimated $26B to whatever it is now. But he seems never to acknowledge that the $26B was floated before the RCN decided what kind of ship it wanted, and before any discussions had taken place with industry as to what could be delivered and when. The $26B figure, therefore, was not a serious estimate of the ships’ price tag, let alone total project costs. It was placeholder at best. It was a guess about a guess about a guess. Including the latter in his reportage would have introduced a welcome sense of perspective into this whole affair.
Then again, I believe that it was Mr. Pugliese who uncovered muddled government thinking on the CSC costs. It believe that it was he who asked Rona Ambrose when she was PM Harper’s Minister for Public Works and Gov’t Services whether the $26B figure was fixed or whether it would be adjusted for inflation. Poor Rona, no doubt aware of her boss’s penchant for balanced budgets – asserted that it was fixed. Anyone with a modicum of experience in procurement or ship-building would have found that assertion baffling, if not wholly ignorant. As Canada would not be cutting steel for at least 15 years, the deleterious effects of defence inflation would have gutted the buying power of $26B to the point where we’d be lucky to get a quartet of ships after all the up-front start-up costs. So, credit to Mr. Pugliese. And a pox on those in government who did not pick up on the story and ensure that the then-NSPS was on sounder footing.
I believe that Murray Brewster (CBC) comes close to being the only other full-time defence-beat journo out there. But this is splitting hairs.
Bill the 26B that everyone loves to bring up definitely was a placeholder, I have a friend at the CSC project at the time and that was it. None of the contracts were ever going to be fixed and no shipyard worth their salt was going to agree to that, too much risk given the timelines.
I personally don’t find him a good journalist, everything is negative and nothing is positive with this person. He always quotes “industry insiders” or some other “source” that is not easily verifiable. He’s had run in’s with Irving and that seems to be the reason why he is biased on pretty much everything about the CSC, AOPS or whatever. A few years ago he was posting something about Asterix on twitter on how great the ship is and whatnot, I pointed out some errors of what he was reporting on and he blocked me. In fact I know of a lot of people he has blocked and he can’t take criticism it seems. There is a fairly large webpage called army.ca which is made up with a lot of military members, apparently he was called out on something and he got a lawyer to go after the site owner. There is a lot of bad reporting out there.
While I am on the record in saying that I do not agree with many of the conclusions David Pugliese draws from his many sources, including the Access to Information (ATI) system, I do credit him with attempting to keep Canadians informed about some of the persistent issues of costs, scheduled deliveries, and some performance shortcomings relating to many different military procurement programs. How else would we have ever known (except after the fact) that DND planned to provide a cost update for the CSC? Is that not something that might concern many Canadians today?
(And, yes, Barnacle Bill, I agree that there are one or two other prominent national journalists who cover many NSS and related issues. However, I am told that they have trouble getting their own media outlets to publish their reports, which is in itself a sad commentary about the parlous state of defence reporting in Canada)
I also can understand some of the frustration Pugliese must feel about the frequent refusal of both DND and our defence industry firms to respond to his requests for basic information. The attitude seems to be: we are not going to provide you with information, and then we will gleefully attack you when, inevitably, you get some of the facts wrong. One can perhaps better appreciate how that attitude might lead media types to ATI to get any meaningful information at all.
For myself, I think the basic impasse is deeply rooted in the different organizational cultural attitudes to what constitutes news, and to whom it should be made available. On the one hand, you have the military with its deeply ingrained habits of secrecy and compliance with authority. On the other hand, you have the media which, in principle at least, has a cultural affinity for openness and the right to challenge authority of any sort.
Finally, with reference to Retired RCN’s repeated attacks on David Pugliese’s journalistic integrity, I will simply refer readers to David Pugliese’s own direct reply to Retired RCN in an comment to a post, “The NSS and Government-Media Relations” (15 December 2020). [https://www.navalreview.ca/2020/12/the-nss-and-government-media-relations/]
Judge for yourselves where the bias lies.
If you want to see perceived bias go through every article on the NSS that he wrote and see how much positivity there is. Negativity sells and positivity doesn’t. He is a journalist and should expect criticism and questioning of what he writes regardless if he is right or wrong.