On questionable purchases

The Chronicle-Herald reports on a planned $5 million sole-source contract being granted by the Department of National Defence to a partner of the company which employed Gordon O'Connor as a lobbyist:

The federal government intends to award a $5-million sole-source contract for armoured-vehicle tracks to a Quebec company whose partner has ties to Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor.

Ottawa plans to buy 55 sets of rubber tracks for the military’s M113 armoured personnel carriers from Soucy International Inc. of Drummondville, Que., according to an advanced contract award notice released Tuesday. It also wants to order "an optional quantity" of up to 90 more sets of tracks and as many as 500 half-sprocket assemblies from the same company.

In June 2002, Soucy International announced it had entered into a "teaming agreement" with United Defense, a Virginia company, "to commercialize the M113 rubber-band track system by developing and making this equipment available to customers in worldwide markets."

Mr. O’Connor, a retired brigadier-general, worked as a consultant lobbyist for United Defense from October 1996 to February 2004. At the time, United Defense was owned by the U.S. company FMC Corp...

Documents Mr. O’Connor filed with the federal government’s lobbyists registration system show his work for United Defense, among other projects, involved trying to win the company an M113 track contract with Canada.

On its own, that would be dubious enough. But it gets worse, as the vehicles in question apparently aren't even fit for use in the mission which is supposedly preventing Canada from deploying troops in significant numbers anywhere else:

Now more than 300 (M113s) have been upgraded, "allowing the army to assign the M113 as combat support and combat service support vehicles to tracked armoured, artillery and engineering units," said Lt. Adam Thompson, a Defence Department spokesman.

The military intends to use the vehicles until 2020 and it wants them ready for overseas missions, he said...

Brian MacDonald, a senior analyst with the Conference of Defence Associations, doubts Canada will deploy M113s to Afghanistan, where roadside bombs, rocket attacks and suicide bombers plague NATO convoys.

"The armour on them is aluminum," said Mr. MacDonald, a retired colonel. "It has roughly the same stopping power as the armour on the LAV (Canada’s eight-wheeled light armoured vehicle), but it’s not sloped. Sloped armour gives you an effective thickness that is greater than the actual thickness."

A decade ago, the federal auditor general reported that thousands of soldiers had been sent into combat zones in Bosnia and Somalia in M113 vehicles that Defence Department studies repeatedly found "seriously deficient" and "very vulnerable to anti-tank mines."

In other words, the apparent conflict isn't limited to the mere fact of rewarding O'Connor's former employer. Instead, there should be serious questions as to why the contract would be enough of a rush to justify sole-sourcing when, absent a change in government or a complete about-face from the Cons, it'll be at least two and a half years (and longer if the Cons continue in their stubbornness surrounding Afghanistan) before there's any prospect of using the affected vehicles in large numbers abroad.

There's certainly a need for legitimate investment in Canada's military. But a rushed process only seems likely to ensure that Canada doesn't receive value for its money. And particularly where there seems to be a serious possibility that the goods purchased won't be put to much use, the Cons' zeal to funnel money to O'Connor's friends can only reflect poorly on a government which seems all too happy to permit waste as long as it's in the name of national defence.