As I have indicated before, what matters to me, and I believe to the public in general, are numbers that one can make sense of that truly inform any decision. That is what accounting was invented for (as one of my teacher once explained): provide decision makers with clear and relevant information.
Personally, it is the politicized way the government figures are derived and then presented that is dishonest, not the actual point accountants wish to make. And the PBO is just as bad, as his F-35 report demonstrated.
Information on the actual item cost of a system is important. Related costs that may be incurred as a result are important (imagine a totally new weapon that costs only 100 millions, but require us to add 5,000 extra service people). Expected operation and maintenance costs are important (and the underlying hypotheses, such as regular peacetime use vs war time use, etc.). But they must be properly presented so as to not create confusion, which means they must be contextualized into the existing budget plans, and not be allowed to be all added up into a single "total life cycle cost" figure that scares everyone.
So for instance, in the shipbuilding case, you would say something like: The AOPS will cost $900M each to build (item cost); during the seven years covered by construction, expenditures are expected to be "a" in year one, "b" in year two, etc. resulting in no increase in the Cf capital budget in year one and two, then $100M increase in capital budget of year three, etc (this contextualizes by indicating the changes only in each year, as other capital projects come to an end or have lower expenditures, etc.); to service the AOPS, we will have to spend $ 250M to build new jetties in Halifax and in Iqaluit (related costs); this will result in spending of "x" in each of the following capital expenditure budget years, with no effect/increases of "y" in those years budget (contextualized); expected O&M costs during the lifetime of the AOPS are expected to be "a" in year "x", "b" in year "y", etc. to the end of service and for normal peacetime use (hypothesis), which represents an increase/decrease of "y" dollars in year "a", etc. etc. and therefore, no change or an increase/decrease of "y" dollars in the overall CF budget for years "a", etc. etc.
This may seem long and convoluted, but the people and the lazy journalist who feed them information (1) would not have an overall scary figure to brandy about and (2) would be able to see immediately not just the specific various cost factors, but their projected effect in every budget year. This last figure being the most important one.
This information exists, but it is currently buried in complex budget calculation internal to the department only, and the journalists don't usually go looking for them: The single total cycle cost figure is much larger and therefore more spectacular for the journalists. It sells more paper to say "The Canadian Navy fleet renewal will cost taxpayers $100b" than to say "The Canadian Navy fleet renewal will require a 2% annual increase in the CF capital acquisition budget for the next five years, remaining at that level thereafter but will not require increases in the annual defence budget otherwise, corrected for inflation."
