Harper government gave Seaspan shipyard $40M contract on election day
Election-day win for shipyard undercut Harper pledge that yards would pay for their own upgrades
On the very day of its defeat last fall, the Harper government quietly awarded a $40-million "engineering" contract to the Seaspan shipyard in North Vancouver, despite having promised that the yard would prepare itself to build new ships "at no cost to Canada."
Two months later, in December 2015, a confidential report for the new Liberal government, obtained by CBC News, found that the program remains chaotic, poorly managed and marked by "fragmentation, inefficiencies and delays."
Seaspan is one of two yards chosen by the former Conservative government to share a vast, $36-billion shipbuilding program for the navy and the coast guard. The other is the Irving shipyard in Halifax. To qualify for the work, both were required to upgrade their yards at their own expense.
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Seaspan was assigned some $8 billion to build four small science vessels, two big supply ships for the navy and a polar icebreaker for the coast guard. But actual construction contracts for the large vessels have not been finalized and the contract awarded last Oct. 19 is not for building any of them.
The contract was part of a little-noticed plan to help Seaspan get ready for work on a scale it has never before attempted, even as the government of Stephen Harper insisted that these preparations would cost taxpayers nothing.
No announcement contradicting that promise was made, although, at a committee hearing in December 2014, a government official admitted to MPs that "basically, what we're doing is investing in the shipyard's capability to get itself up to capacity, to start churning out vessels."
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