Wed, May 2, 2007
What a waste
Military assault on taxpayers tops auditor general's quarterly list
By GREG WESTON
In today's episode of Generals in Wonderland, the genius brigade at National Defence is on a mission to modernize Canada's air defence system, a $156-million boondoggle that today is only about 100% over budget, eight years late -- and still isn't finished.
The U.S. military has a Star Wars program; Canada has Spaced Out.
This epic military assault on taxpayers is one of the more expensive bureaucratic snafus described in Auditor General Sheila Fraser's quarterly compendium of government waste, mismanagement and stupidity in high places.
Fraser's tale of fiscal woe begins in 1997 when the Canadian and U.S. defence departments agreed to upgrade the computer systems used by the two countries to monitor North American airspace as part of the 50-year-old NORAD agreement.
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, far from North American airspace being made safe from enemy missiles, most of what has been incoming on DND's radar for the past decade is bills.
In 1997, the Liberal government of the day approved total funding of $65 million for Canada's end of the deal, primarily modernizing technologies located at the NORAD tactical command centre in Sudbury, Ont.
Canadian defence officials pledged the project would be complete by 1999, and result in efficiencies that would save taxpayers $16 million annually.
But the auditor general reports within a year of the project launch, costs were already soaring and DND was getting its first warning signs the whole project itself could vanish in thin air.
As it is with all misguided government mega-projects, the solution to so much overspending on a risky proposition was to throw good money after bad. Lots of it.
In 1998, the Liberal government approved an additional $27.5 million, in part to relocate the Sudbury command centre from an underground bunker to a supposedly modest surface building.
The auditor general reports that the feds agreed to cough up more millions after the military brass promised the move would reap huge operational savings.
PIE IN THE AIRSPACE
Alas, it was all just more pie in the airspace. In February 1999, less than two years after the project started and only months from its originally scheduled completion date, National Defence was back.
Fraser reports the generals vowed that for only another lousy $36.7 million -- enough for a good start on a new hospital somewhere -- "the project would achieve operating capability."
Or not. Barely six months later, with the expected cost of the radar system having doubled from $65 million to over $130 million and nothing to show for it, the U.S. abandoned the project as a lost cause.
Undaunted, the Canadian military apparently decided the able cheque-writers at DND didn't need the U.S. to continue their long march into a sea of red ink.
In no time at all, the generals had convinced their evidently brain-dead Liberal masters to increase the budget yet again, this time to $143 million for a truly made-in-Canada solution -- adapting a European radar system to the then existing American-made NORAD technologies.
Three years and $50 million later, the second great Canadian radar project crashed and burned after the Americans began developing a whole new system of their own.
Once again, Canadian taxpayers had spent a fortune for nothing, integrating European technologies with an obsolete American system.
In the end, DND essentially bought a new system from the Americans for $13 million, and apparently it may actually be fully functional some day.
As for that money-saving move from the Sudbury bunker to a new above-ground facility, all is progressing pretty much as one would expect. Federal auditors report the initial $9 million pricetag for the building has passed $26 million, and still the new facility can't be fully occupied due to "flaws in security during construction."
Code red! Incoming bills at 12 o'clock!
