So yesterday I wrote about the Conservatives plan to spend billions on new F-35 fighter aircraft.  Here’s a quick follow up.

The tab for 65 F-35 fighters will ring in around nine billion dollars.  But wait, it gets better.  When you purchase a bunch of shiny new aircraft, you need parts and service on them.  This is called a service contract.  If you’ve bought anything from Best Buy, you know what that is.  Now think about this.  If the geek of the week at Best Buy says “Sign here for the service contract, and I’ll tell you later how much it will be.”  Would you still take the service contract?  I suspect not.

Not so for Mr. Harper’s Conservative government.  They signed off on the F-35 purchase without getting an actual dollar figure for the accompanying support.  That apparently won’t be available until production is under way.  If that seems a tad peculiar, that’s the sort of thing to expect when you agree to single source your new aircraft.  That’s right folks.  We can only purchase our new jets from Lockheed Martin, and only they can service them.

But, there is some good news from our leaderless fears.  They’re also going to upgrade our navy.  To the tune of thirty-three billion dollars.  The good news, that money is scheduled to remain in Canada.  Twenty-five billion goes to contracts in Halifax, the other eight billion goes to Vancouver.  Which is exactly what I wanted for the aircraft update.  The project is expected to generate around fifteen thousand jobs.  Which kind of makes my point about the kind of jobs that would be created by building our own jets.  But for reasons best known to themselves, the Conservatives decided that it would be bad to create too many jobs all at once.

Now, they’re talking about maybe buying us some nuclear submarines. The used non-nuclear subs that we bought from Britain were a total bust from the get-go.  We’ve spent more rebuilding them than we paid for them, and they still aren’t actually sea-worthy.  So the only obvious solution is to buy some used nuclear subs.  The estimated price tag for all this plutoinum powered goodness?  How about three billion a pop.  If we replace our four leaky, crappy existing subs with spiffy new used subs it’ll ring in at around twelve million.  Cheap at half the price.  Yes?  Probably.

Here’s the fun part and the punchline to my headline.  During our recent federal election, the Conservatives were at great pains to tell Canadians how much money the Liberals would spend if elected.  The Conservatives would be our fiscal saviours.  Or maybe not.

F-35s=9 billion + unspecified multi-billion support contract.  New ships=33 billion.  Nuclear subs=12 billion.  Total 63 billion + unspecified multi-billion dollar support contract.

Good thing we didn’t elect those free spending Liberals eh?

Cheers, Winston