Full Pundit: Popular government plan to vastly overpay for Navy vessels in jeopardy
Politicians and your money
Postmedia’s Michael Den Tandt updates us on the federal government’s much-vaunted shipbuilding program’s inevitable descent into farce and partisan politics. The Vancouver shipyard involved has spent $170 million upgrading its facilities to be able to build the ships the Navy needs, but missed the deadline for doing so by six months — in part because of “a lack of available hands willing to sustain high Vancouver living and housing costs on an industrial worker’s wage.” And wouldn’t you just know it, there’s a shipyard in Quebec that could pick up some of the slack, and that might be very advantageous for the Conservatives!
A couple of ideas spring to mind: One, perhaps that shipyard in Vancouver could offer workers more money. But then, that might bust up the economics of the plan. Mind you, a shipbuilding plan that relied on not paying people enough money to live near the shipbuilding yard isn’t a very good plan in the first place, is it?
This brings us to idea number two: As CBC’s Terry Milewski recently reported, the much-vaunted original plan — the one that wouldn’t go pear-shaped, honest to God! — involved Canada overpaying for ships by a an utterly staggering amount. Our supply ships will be half the size of the South Korean-built ones Britain has ordered, and cost five times as much, Milewski reports. Our Arctic patrol vessels will cost seven times as much as the Polish-built ones Denmark has ordered. In other words, the plan even as conceived was rank insanity. Blerg!
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