National Defence
Why humans are so obsessed with time
Simon Garfield examines how railways and wars, among other factors, have fed our dependence on the ticking clock
The Defence Department decides it is the judge of the PBO’s mandate
A new front in the fight over disclosure
“Losing soldiers was a shock to everybody’s system”
In conversation with Defence Minister Peter MacKay on Afghanistan, the F-35 controversy and military spending
The F-35: The Conservatives were ‘dead right’
You might have thought that the auditor general’s report and the KPMG audit amounted to a repudiation of the Harper government’s accounting for the F-35. Gary Goodyear would like to assure you otherwise.
Mythbusting the F-35
Aaron Wherry checks out the facts in the spin
The reset button
Aaron Wherry catches you up on a day in F-35 news
The F-35: The way we were
Ahead of the release of the KPMG audit, here is the transcript of the September 15, 2010 meeting of the national defence committee, at which Peter MacKay, Rona Ambrose, Tony Clement, assistant deputy minister Dan Ross, assistant deputy minister Tom Ring and Lieutenant-General J.P.A. Deschamps appeared to discuss the F-35. Two months earlier, the Harper government had announced it was “acquiring the fifth generation Joint Strike Fighter F-35 aircraft.”
What was the PM talking about?
What did Stephen Harper mean when he talked about “ripping up those contracts?”
The Commons: Back to the future of the F-35
The opposition insists on living in the past
Chris Alexander has the worst job in Ottawa
For whatever reason, Chris Alexander, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of defence, has been assigned the task of going on television to face questions about the F-35 on behalf of the government. This did not go very well for Mr. Alexander in August. And this did not go terribly well for Mr. Alexander on Friday. But he seemed to do a bit better on CTV’s Question Period on Sunday. At the very least, he seemed to concede some government responsibility for the pre-April 2012 impression that a decision had been made to purchase the F-35.
The latest on the F-35
Reuters, the Canadian Press, Star, Globe and CTV report that a four-person panel will review the options for a new jet fighter and John Ivison says the price tag for the F-35 will be $45.8 billion, but John Geddes notes that a panel review is not the same as an open competition.
What’s going on with the F-35?
Postmedia now reports that a final decision will be made this morning, but there seems general agreement among everyone’s anonymous sources about what that decision will be.