Auditor general warns federal shipbuilding budgets ‘insufficient’

The Department of National Defence has made trade-offs in capabilities of the Navy resupply vessels to be built by North Vancouver’s Seaspan Marine Corp. and may have to make more to stay on their $2.3 billion budget, Canada’s Auditor General Michael Ferguson warned Tuesday.

That was among the findings of Ferguson’s analysis of the government’s National Shipbuilding Procurement Program, which had federal ministers, departmental officials and industry skirting questions over whether billions more dollars will be needed to make sure the government’s national shipbuilding plan doesn’t sink.

For the military component, Ferguson characterized the $26 billion the government has set aside to replace the navy’s aging destroyers and frigates is “insufficient.”

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