CBC- Canada’s plan to donate refurbished armour to Ukraine is still spinning its wheels
A plan to rebuild and modernize two dozen decommissioned Canadian light armoured vehicles for donation to Ukraine is stuck in bureaucratic limbo more than nine months after the defence department handed the vehicles over to an Ontario company that specializes in restoration, CBC News has learned.
In my experience with civil servants at all levels of government, they are only concerned with keeping their jobs going and not with successful outcomes.
Our father worked as an electrical engineer with Department of Transport and then in management with Public Works for the last 20 years of his working life. The regional offices were slightly better – he worked in Edmonton which also handled the Yukon and the North West Territories. He did the electrical layouts for the new airports which were being constructed at that time. He hated working in Ottawa as he felt that he was the only one who acted like a contractor (which he was during the 1950’s).
They should ship them to Mara Lago instead, so the next CIA trained Rasputin can earn his day in front of the cameras.
Great idea! These small arms assassination attempts aren’t getting the job done. That’s a sign to the TLAs that they need to upgrade.
Now all they have to do is figure out how to get one of these into the hands of one of their ‘lone nutters’ [eyeroll] without their involvement being too obvious.
Oh wait… the TLAs already don’t care if their involvement is obvious. Ignore that point.
The movie will be called The Bourne Incompetency
good lord, those would only be target practice for Putin’s soldiers.
Why waste the money. They’ll last as long as the average conscript in the meat grinder. 700,000 dead and counting. Victoria Nuland smirks as she lies with every sentence. The Spawn Fuhrer must be taking his orders from Dick Cheney these days.
Knowing the “quality” of much of the Canadian military equipment, Russia might think their provision to Ukraine might actually be considered support for Putin!
Are these vehicles “spinning their wheels”? Military vehicles can be hard to track, in describing them one should tread carefully!
Regardless of one’s stance on the Ukraine-Russia war, the materiel-procurement department at DND is profoundly incompetent. Why does all this bureaucratic paper shuffling still go on?
Because the FIRST rule of bureaucracies is PROTECT THE BUREAUCRACY. SECOND rule is GROW THE BUREAUCRACY. Bureaucracy has no other purpose.
I believe it would be more effective to deploy the material-procurement department at DND to Ukraine than the retreads they are trying to fob off on them.
The refurbished armour will arrive with the ‘air defence system’ the Bong promised Zelensky 2 years ago and nobody’s heard a peep about since.
“Pfister said the company is using a revolutionary — but proven — restoration process. ” Is that what they call a garden hose and bondo? Government Procurement and Contracting is broken in Canada, I don’t know why any Defense company is doing business with Ottawa. These old APCs are going to get shredded anyways. That company should probably head to Ukraine (or next door to) and refurbish more modern vehicle that are littering the battlefied over there. If the Army got rid of those old wrecks, you can bet your bottom dollar they are completely and totally wrecked, the vehicular equivalent of our clapped-out Brownings HP.
Used to work at a supplier to Canadian mil procurement. Contracts drag on for years, especially when Liberal governments are in power.
Much of the $$ is soaked up by planning meetings, conferences, detailed planning documents, and endless amendments.
Plans must be extremely detailed, with every word parsed and commented on.
Inevitably, by the time plans are approved to the appropriate levels and the $$ actually ‘allocated’, the circumstances had changed and the plans were no longer effective.
This, of course, leads to more meetings and conferences, and more amendments to apply to the very detailed but out of date plan. Each amendment, of course, may require a contract change ($).
The weirdest experience was dealing with a DND staffer who was in the business of procuring weapons, etc., but was a full on vegan who refused to even eat honey because “it’s stealing from the baby bees.”
One of the stupidest thing I saw in DND is for them to contract a company to make a 3D model of an AK47. 3 D models can be useful for training say, aircraft techs on complicated machinery. But an AK 47? The idea was to train the new Afghan Army with this. Afghanistan is not exactly silicon valley, and illiterate peasants not very up to speed on using computers. If they had any. One thing there is plenty of in Afghanistan, is real, live AK47s. They could train a whole friggin army with the real thing for the price of that 3D model.
Back in the 90’s, I sold machine shop equipment and software in eastern Ontario. DND had their own shop in ottawa and wanted to buy some CAM software from me. I instructed them on how to write the requisition so that only our software/hardware solution could be considered and boom! After about 6 months, i got a PO(about $20k). While we were waiting for delivery, Jean Chrétien got elected and immediately announced that he was closing that shop. I thought the deal was done and i went back to the shop to see what all the guys would do. Nobody cared. Labor agreements meant that everyone had to be given a new job within 30 kms at equal or better pay. They took delivery of the order and added to the po by hiring me to give them training. Then the hardware/software went into “storage”. A couple years later, i was doing training in our Toronto office and had some guys from cold lake come in b/c they were buying the same thing. When i mentioned the ottawa package, they told me that although those items existed as database entries, nobody could find the actual products so they were just buying new. Easier that way…