Recently here, at TVO Today, I wrote a column wondering whether we would actually learn any lessons from that recent unpleasant shared experience of days spent inhaling smoke from distant wildfires. Regular readers of my column here will know that I am monumentally skeptical of our willingness or ability to learn any lessons from history. We don’t really do that here in Canada, the land that accountability forgot. But in the interest of being a little bit more optimistic: I’ve been fascinated in recent days to see some serious discussion about increasing the size of Canada’s water-bomber fleet. The specialized aircraft can drop either literal water scooped out of lakes or rivers while in flight — the planes basically skim across the surface while reloading — or tanks of flame-retardant chemicals onto fires or areas threatened with the spread of fires. They aren’t perfect and could never fully replace a well-trained and equipped force of firefighting professionals on the ground. But they are a powerful and useful tool, and we may well need more of them.
And we do have some. The CBC just published a fantastically useful article (thanks, guys!) on Canada’s fleet of water bombers. As the article reports, there are just over a hundred of them, but closer to 60 of them are of the optimal type. (During emergencies, helicopters can also be used to drop buckets of water.) Canada’s current fleet, though, as the CBC notes and as anyone who’s spent much time reading about the issue knows, is old. These are some elderly birds we’re flying.
Water-bomber aircraft are particularly useful in a country like Canada. I don’t need to spend much time recapping what every Canadian high-school graduate knows about our geography. We are a massive landmass and a relatively small population (recent milestones notwithstanding. Congrats, my 40 million best friends!). With our low population density, and with most of the population being clustered in relatively small areas, there are vast forests in this country that cannot be reasonably maintained by human forestry officials or easily managed, should they burn. The long range and high speed of water-bombing aircraft make a particular sense for a country like ours.
You are seeing some of this discussed openly, such as in the above-referenced CBC article and this recent article in the Globe and Mail, which made an explicit case for adding to Canada’s water-bomber fleet. Given that many of our aircraft are aging and will soon need replacement anyway, it may make sense to modernize the fleet while also expanding it. This is the sort of thing, as the Globe article notes, that the federal government should be responsible for. The Globe article also suggests, and I would endorse this fully, that this federal fleet (or at least a part of it) should be kept at a state of readiness on a full-time basis, so it could be deployed abroad as part of foreign aid to developing countries or to provide assistance to other developed allies facing their own fires. (Many of Canada’s friends and allies are currently helping us with personnel and equipment.) Canadians like to talk about our above-weight-punching, soft-power-wielding efforts on the world stage. Helping friends and allies prevent their countries from burning down seems like an awfully easy way to live up to our own self-image.
So, yeah, I’m sold: while the devil is always in the details, a modernized and expanded water-bomber fleet makes all kinds of sense. But — you knew there was a but — the immediate concern I have, as a journalist who has spent more time than he would like reflecting upon writing about military procurement, is that our federal government is really, really bad at buying things. Things like, just to name one example, fleets of new aircraft.
We are apparently going to get some F-35 fighters to replace our CF-18 fleet. The CF-18s are about as old as I am, and I am my-back-hurts-and-I-don’t-know-why years old. So, yay, F-35s. That decision took about a decade longer than needed. We’re also currently trying to replace our elderly fleet of military surveillance aircraft. That program is predictably running into problems. Our replacement program for search-and-rescue planes has also run into challenges and delays, with our old workhorse rescue aircraft being forced into retirement due to advanced age before the sleek, new modern successors were ready. And for the love of God, dear readers, don’t make me talk about the Sea Kings. I haven’t the strength.
I could list many other examples of botched military procurement. I decided to limit myself to those involving aircraft, and even then I assuredly missed a few — those were just the ones that occurred to me offhand. This is taking us into unpleasantly familiar territory: we live in a country where the solutions to many of our problems seem obvious — until we try to actually implement those solutions and discover that we are somehow incapable.
TVO Today, of course, largely focuses on Ontario policy and politics. And I wonder whether there is a provincial role here. Given the major deliverology challenges that our federal government is notoriously guilty of, particularly when it comes to procuring fleets of aerial vehicles, should the provinces simply do this on their own? Not individually, but should they get together and agree on a joint purchase of standardized aircraft?
I get that it would make more sense for this to be a federal effort, especially if this fleet is specifically intended to be shared with foreign friends and allies in times of crisis. The purchasing of the fleet and the logistics of sustaining it are things that makes theoretical sense on a national scale. The problem is, though, that we have all the evidence we need before us that this is precisely the sort of thing Ottawa just can’t do these days. At least not on any reasonable timeframe.
Time is not our friend here. These are specialized aircraft, and, as the CBC noted, European countries have recently placed large orders that will take years to fulfill. If this is something we want to do, we’re going to want to get our own orders in as soon as possible, knowing we won’t see new planes until the 2030s. In a perfect world, the federal government would lead that effort. But in the increasingly singed world we actually live in, there may be an argument for the provinces simply sitting down together, figuring out which aircraft would most suit our collective needs, and using their combined purchasing power to procure a large number of water-bomber aircraft that can be operated by individual provinces and be available for local use when needed and sharing when necessary.
It’s not a perfect solution, but we don’t always (or often) have the luxury of those. We’re going to need these planes, in large numbers, soon — we arguably already do. Something to consider, exalted premiers?