Ottawa slams the brakes on plan to buy new military trucks

[chris vickery]

Very good points Rob, that I never considered.
Can you explain to me why we have chosen to purchase foreign made equipment rather than building it ourselves?
It seems to me a point in case once more where we are sending Canadian jobs outside of our boarders rather than keeping them at Home. You would think something like our our Defence should be made from home grown expertise, construction and manpower.
For the naysayers out there, recall our military vehicle capacity during WW2 and the fact that we could be a vendor instead of a buyer, just like in WW2.
Canada should maintain its own Defence Industry, on a smaller scale, least in my opinion. Being close neighbours with the US has me wondering why we do not consider anything that they use and perhaps ride coat tail on some of their contracts as a second option?

[rob love]

It very likely will be built in Canada if possible, although I can't say is that is a condition of this tender. The IHC DEfense trucks were an exception. Vehicles like the AHSVS Mercedes Actros were wartime purchases and in the need for timeliness they were bought straight from Mercedes in Germany. The G-wagons were also bought straight out of Europe.

Understand that to simply set up a production facility to manufacture a limited run of 1500 trucks every 25 years is not economically feasible. Normally a Canadian or North American company will pair up with a known foreign producer of a SMP vehicle. Once the vehicle is selected, it will then be assembled in Canada, with as much Cdn content as is reasonable. This will normally mean a North American made alternator, Canadian tires, M-series lighting, and things like choke or throttle cables.

[rob love]

Canadian content on the Iltis also included the choke and throttle cables. I met an LCMM once who related the story that he met a guy at some function who's company made these cables. Bombardier promised that if the company ever sold cables directly to DND rather than through Bombardier, that Bombardier would never buy another cable from them again.

I believe there was also some debate between DND and Bombardier as to who owned the drawings for the parts. In the end, the DND name was on the bottom corner of the drawings, so we were able to source parts from alternate suppliers.

[rob love]

It is my understanding that when Atco lost the Cancap project to SNC Lavalin in Bosnia, Atco tried to claim that all the written docs wrt SOPs etc were the property of ATCO and not transferrable to the replacement company. In the end, DND pointed out that they were all written on the DND's dime, and thus were the property of DND.