Davie shipyard boss calls Canada's national shipbuilding strategy 'bizarre'

unbelievable. What is the matter with these numbnuts?

Because if the government breaks legal signed contracts with the other yards the penalty clause payouts they'd be obligated to make would wipe out any savings they made with the "discount" builder?

Sure. But who would sign cost plus deals in the first place. I worked on a cost plus job in construction and have never seen such waste, and in the end the project had all sorts of problems anyway. It seems governments never learn this, even with supposed "conservatives" at the helm.

The numbnuts that keep electing them, that's what.

What's the difference. These contracts were signed by the Conservatives, doubt the LIberals would be any more fiscally prudent in this matter.

I don't get the thinking. Unless the politician is getting kickbacks, there's nothing in it for him to sign stupid contracts like this. And politicians know that voters are pissed at government waste, so they would score points if they tightened up the fiscal oversight. Yet on and on this sort of crap goes.

Wait, maybe the Cons were following the GWB gameplan, where you make government so expensive that it has to collapse under its own weight and we finally get those jackbooted thugs off our necks.

I'd keep in mind that nothing of this magnitude ever comes in on budget, not even when a supposed discount gets offered. Don't know what the end quality of the ships would be like, especially if built at a yard that was pretty much bankrupt not all that long ago. Don't need a repeat of the submarine fiasco where getting something on the cheap cost a naval officer his life and extra billions in refurbishments were required to make the damn things serviceable.

Procurement has to be fixed someday though. It somehow seems to get worse every year. Despite how much we like telling ourselves how nice and clean and honest we are on everything Canadian procurement has to be one of the dirtiest and most graft ridden among the developed nations.

The numbnuts that keep electing them, that's what.

Boom.

This guy might want to shut his piehole because, MIL Davie turned it into that decades ago. The end products with few exceptions received from MIL Davie by the Navy has left a stench so bad that Ottawa will likely never let a contract out to them ever again be it Liberal or Conservative.

This is the same company that once held a warship hostage while holding out for more money well above the cost they guaranteed. They screwed up 4 Tribal Class destroyers so badly that the Dockyards had to basically redo half the refit and it significantly shortened their life span. Things like compartments with one coat of paint and no primer. Firemain valves that let go. We even had one let go in the Fwd magazine causing the compartment to completely flood out and send a fire signal to the FDSAC panel. Not bothering to tell anyone about the The Fwd King post shafts being warped after putting in the VLS system. The engineering equipment required that the company from Germany send a rep over to fix the issues that they fouled up. I could go on for pages with the problems over and above the continual cost overruns that Davie Shipyards was responsible for.

Every contract let for Davie by the Gov't in the past 6 decades was based on politics rather than ability and performance. They used to do things like take the TSD staff out to supper drinks and a day of partying every Friday to try and get them to ignore some of the minor faults, which in reality turned into large faults. Anybody remember how Tony Soprano operated.

The place was a union den of iniquity and all you have to do is remember the Montreal Olympics with their inefficiency, ineptitude and cost overruns to see how MIL Davie operated. Is it still the same? Who knows but my guess is the unions and quite a few of senior management are still there which makes me think that it probably hasn't changed all that much.

Oddly enough though, the actual Shipbuilding yard didn't do that bad a job on the CPF's. Go figure. But, if I was to hazard a guess it would be that since the Gov't expected to sell alot of these warships offshore there was much more oversight than they ever had with the refit/conversion contracts they got.

I am just so happy that my old man isn't around to see what a farce Canadian shipbuilding has become.

Just Davie whining because they got shut out of the NSPS program because they were bankrupt.

Maybe Canada should consider a program with US shipyards. Not saying they're perfect but at least at the end of the day they get hulls in the water.

I suppose that Davie is a "discount shipyard" in the context of this case but the fly-by -nighters have built a good part of our Navy and Coast Guard going back to WWII.

Why would we do that? Irving and SEASPAN are well into the construction of the first ships of the project.