F-35 process ‘corrupted’ from the beginning, says Williams

Federal bureaucrats are the ones who “hijacked” the F-35 procurement process, but Cabinet ministers went along without questioning it when they should have in order to avoid the controversy the government is facing today on acquiring 65 stealth fighter jets at a newly-projected cost of $45.8-billion over 42 years, say some critics.

“We know that the fiasco certainly started by the bureaucrats hijacking the process,” said Alan Williams, former assistant deputy minister for procurement in National Defence and a leading critic of the government’s F-35 procurement process.

Since 2010 when the government signalled it would in fact buy the F-35s in a sole-sourced procurement process for $9-billion and $7-billion in operation and maintenance costs, it has been mired in controversy over several issues—the two major ones being a disputed cost (the Parliamentary Budget Office estimated the price tag to be $29-billion over a life-cycle of 30 years for acquisition, operation and maintenance which Auditor General Michael Ferguson later verified in his own report at $25-billion over 20 years) and the secrecy behind the sole-sourced procurement, which eventually led to the government being found in contempt of Parliament and triggered the May 2011 election.

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