Canadian special forces to lease new surveillance planes, but details shrouded in secrecy

On the same subject

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  September 12, 2019 | Local, Land

  Canadian government quietly signs $2 billion defence contract with General Dynamics

  By DAVID PUGLIESE, OTTAWA CITIZEN A $2 billion dollar contract for new armoured vehicles was quietly signed with General Dynamics Land Systems earlier this month. The Liberal government originally announced Aug. 18 that negotiations were underway for the sole source deal to purchase 360 combat support Light Armoured Vehicles from General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada in London, ON. A notice on the federal government's procurement website noted that Public Services and Procurement Canada, on behalf of National Defence, awarded the contract to General Dynamics valued at $2 billion on Sept. 5. That cost includes initial spare parts, technical manuals and training. Public Services and Procurement Canada did not issue a news release about the major award. The department did not respond to a request for comment. The overall project is estimated to cost $3 billion but that includes in-service support, construction of new facilities and other support to the program. The combat support Light Armoured Vehicles was originally announced by the Liberal government with an estimated cost between $500 million and $1.5 billion. The plan was to award the contract in 2023 after a competition between defence firms. But with the federal election looming the deal was fast-tracked by the Liberals, joining a series of recent defence-related funding announcements. A competition was jettisoned, replaced with a sole-source deal with General Dynamics. The deal includes a $650 million repayable loan to General Dynamics. Details have not been released. General Dynamics will provide the new vehicles in eight variants. They will be used as ambulances and in other roles such as vehicle recovery, engineering, mobile repair, electronic warfare and as command posts. The current fleet of armoured support vehicles is comprised of the LAV II Bison and the M113 tracked vehicle. The DND stated the contract was sole-sourced to General Dynamics as the firm builds most other armoured vehicles for the Canadian Forces and having a vehicle based on the same chassis allows for savings in maintenance and training. https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/canadian-government-quietly-signs-2-billion-defence-contract-with-general-dynamics

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  January 17, 2019 | Local, Aerospace, Naval, Land

  Canadian military falling well short of its target for recruiting women

  Murray Brewster · CBC News New statistics also show efforts to bring in more Indigenous, visible minority recruits failing The Canadian military has barely moved the needle on its ambitious plan to recruit more women, just over a year after the Liberal government introduced its gender-focused defence policy, new figures reveal. The stated intention of Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jonathan Vance was to have women make up 25 per cent of the Armed Forces by 2025-26. Statistics released by the Office of the Chief of Military Personnel show that while the number of female recruits coming through the door has increased slightly, it has not been enough to boost overall representation. As of the end of April, women made up only 15.4 per cent of both the combined regular and reserve forces. The story is the same for Indigenous Canadians and visible minorities — those recruitment numbers remain just as anemic as they have been for several years. Indigenous Canadians make up about 2.8 per cent of the Armed Forces; DND has set a goal of getting that share up to 3.5 per cent. Visible minorities make up 8.2 per cent; the target percentage is 11.8. But the military and the Liberal government have more political capital invested in the effort to get more women into uniform. It's central to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's mantra of gender equality, and to Canada's desire to put women at the heart of a reformed international peacekeeping system. The drive to recruit more women comes as the military attempts to overhaul its culture in the wake of a damning report in 2015 by retired Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps, who said a "sexualized culture" within the military was behind an endemic problem with sexual harassment and misconduct. Female recruitment picking up — but slowly There were 860 women enrolled in the military in the last fiscal year, which ended on March 31 — an increase of eight per cent over the previous year. It's not enough, said the chief of military personnel. "Those are still not meeting the number we need to have in order to meet the 25 per cent target and we're conscious of that," Lt.-Gen. Chuck Lamarre told CBC News in an interview. The slow pace of female recruitment has forced senior brass to take more direct control, he said. "We recognize it's going to take a much more disciplined approach, a much more targeted approach to go get more women, more visible minority and more Aboriginal folks to come join the Canadian Armed Forces," said Lamarre, who insisted the Armed Forces can still hit the target, which was first established in early 2016. The direction from Vance back then had been to increase the representation of women in the forces by one per cent per year over a decade. The new statistics show the military has seen healthy increases in the number of women applying to be officers, or to join the navy or air force. But National Defence is having a harder time convincing women to join the army, and to become non-commissioned members of the rank and file. Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said it will take time, but there signs of change, notably the desire of women to become officers and leaders, a cultural shift that the DesChamps report said is necessary. "As time goes on, I am confident we will be successful," Sajjan said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday morning from Vietnam. "We are very happy that we are recruiting women into leadership roles." Lamarre said he believes the military is fighting against perceptions about the kind of career being offered. "People have a tendency to self-select out before they give it a shot, and I think that's a mistake," he said, pointing to the military's struggle to get women to consider signing up for trades such as aircraft, vehicle and maritime mechanics. "We are attracting more women into the officer corps, but I think we need to broaden that even more. Part of it is demystifying some of those occupations. Some of them look to be hard and exclusively centred towards men. That's not the case at all. We have some great examples of women who are operating in every occupation." Military's image problem persists Others — DesChamps among them — argue that the perception of the military as a tough place to be a woman hasn't gone away. Despite the military's high-profile campaign to stamp out misconduct — known as Operation Honour — and the increasing number of sexual assault cases being tried in the military justice system, many say that little has changed when it comes to the macho nature of military culture. "In the last three years, in my opinion, more could have been done" to stop harassment and make the military a more welcoming career choice for women, Deschamps told the Senate defence committee last week. "What I have seen is, not a lot of progress has been made." The federal government has faced two class-action lawsuits launched by survivors of sexual assault and misconduct in the military. The cases entered settlement discussions last winter after it was revealed government lawyers filed a statement of defence that said National Defence "does not owe members of the Canadian Armed Forces any duty to protect them from sexual harassment and assault." https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-military-falling-well-short-of-its-target-for-recruiting-women-1.4691356

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  March 29, 2019 | Local, Naval

  SNC-Lavalin's legal woes are putting a $500M federal defence contract at risk

  Murray Brewster · CBC News A SNC-Lavalin contract with the Department of National Defence (DND) worth half a billion dollars comes up for renewal next year — when the Montreal-based engineering giant is expected to be on trial over corruption charges. The pending expiry of the $507 million contract to support the servicing of minor warships and auxiliary vessels, signed in 2011, sharpens the debate over what a guilty verdict would mean for the Quebec-based engineering giant and whether a conviction actually would mean subjecting the company to a 10-year ban on bidding for federal contracts. The stakes are high for DND. In addition to holding an important defence contract, SNC-Lavalin has access to a range of secret military drawings, equipment and intellectual property. Although its agreements are periodically reopened to new bids, the embattled corporation has been a reliable contractor for National Defence. A survey of active federal government contracts shows DND and Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) were the two biggest users of SNC-Lavalin services and construction during the current fiscal year. Across the whole of the federal government, SNC-Lavalin holds 53 'active' federal government contracts — 25 of them with DND — with a combined value of $670 million. A company with a big federal footprint The firm signed roughly $68 million in new or renewed agreements with the federal government ($23.7 million with DND and PSPC alone) in the current budget year up to the end of December. That figure excludes what could be a large number of smaller contracts worth less than $25,000 — contracts the federal government can award without competition. An inventory of those agreements is extremely difficult to track down, but PSPC acknowledged it awarded $146,522 in minor work to SNC-Lavalin in the current fiscal year. The RCMP laid corruption charges against SNC-Lavalin and some of its units in February 2015. All the charges relate to the company's operations in Libya. The charges allege that the company offered officials in that country $47 million in bribes and accuse SNC-Lavalin and two of its subsidiaries of defrauding various Libyan public agencies of approximately $129.8 million over 10 years, starting in 2001. The company has been at the centre of a political firestorm since early February, when The Globe and Mail reported that former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould felt pressured by the Prime Minister's Office to grant the company a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) — a legal tool which would have allowed the company to avoid a criminal trial by acknowledging fault and paying a fine, among other conditions. In defending their interest in a DPA for SNC-Lavalin, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and others in his government have pointed to the scale of the engineering firm's business, the possibility it could be banned from federal government work and the number of people it employs. Scott Newark, a former Crown prosecutor who teaches at Simon Fraser University, said it's been clear from the outset that avoiding the federal contract ban has been SNC-Lavalin's main objective. The question of what would happen to those federal contracts should the company be convicted is a subject of debate, however. There are policy provisions that allow federal officials to cancel existing contracts and ban future bids from a company convicted of serious crimes, such as bribery. PSPC would only say the federal government would "assess the situation" if "a supplier becomes ineligible during the life of a contract" due to a conviction. The power to terminate or suspend a contract rests with federal bureaucrats, according to PSPC's Ineligibility and Suspension Policy. A company convicted of serious crimes can avoid being fired by the feds by signing an undertaking stating "that it will conduct business with Canada in an ethical and responsible manner." But there's never a guarantee that such an undertaking will be offered to a convicted company. Just three companies are currently banned from carrying on business with the federal government — all relatively small firms in Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland. No ban on bidding during trial A spokesman for DND said there's nothing stopping SNC-Lavalin from continuing to bid on federal contracts as they appear, even during its trial. "These contracts were issued pursuant to Government of Canada contracting regulations, particularly as it concerns open, fair and transparent competitions," said Dan Le Bouthillier in an email. "Those regulations also stipulate that any company eligible to bid on Government of Canada contracts may continue to do so, so long as they meet the necessary requirements for the work." In an analysis piece for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Newark said PSPC is working on a revision of its 'integrity regime' policy to give federal officials more discretion to waive bans of individual companies contracting with the federal government. Public Services Minister Carla Qualtrough has said her department is looking at eliminating fixed bidding disqualification periods and replacing them with a wholly discretionary determination — which would include the option of imposing no contracting ban at all. Even under the current system, Newark said, an order cancelling a company's federal contracts and banning it from future contracts following a conviction is far from a slam-dunk. "I checked on the Criminal Code and the Corruption of Public Foreign Officials Act and, of course, it's not in those statutes. It's not a mandatory consequence." he said. The integrity regime review has been underway in Qualtrough's department since 2017. Newark said he's amazed that nobody with the company or the federal government seems to have realized that a conviction for SNC-Lavalin could lead to something other than a 10-year contracting ban. "Why didn't anybody say, 'Hey wait a minute. We know what about this. We're changing our policy,'" he said. The head of procurement at DND attempted to reassure members of the all-party House of Commons defence committee during a hearing last month that SNC-Lavalin's "secret" work for the federal government does not pose an unacceptable risk. "We hold the intellectual property, the drawings and everything," Pat Finn testified on Feb. 28. "Irrespective of the circumstances in which the contract is terminated, we hold the material." https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/snc-lavalin-s-legal-woes-are-putting-a-500m-federal-defence-contract-at-risk-1.5073996