Posted without comment, from Cndnmilitary.ca highlighting mine:
The cost for the design and construction of six-to-eight APVs has been budgeted at $3.1 billion CAD, an amount that is testament to the high cost of doing business with the Canadian shipbuilding industry. Comparably, the construction costs associated with eight proven Svalbard-class vessels would be (at current exchange rates) approximately $850 million CAD, based on the unit price previously mentioned. The motivation behind this decision by the government is to provide maximum benefit for taxpayer’s dollars (by paying three-times the price of the benchmark design for Arctic patrol vessels), and to provide benefits to regions dependent on the “ailing” Canadian shipbuilding industry. The procurement will conform to the Canadian Shipbuilding Policy Framework, which will require the federal government to procure, repair, and refit the vessels in Canada, so long as there remains a competitive domestic marketplace.
Allright, I will comment. Presuming these numbers are accurate, the question now becomes whether or not we will get 2 billion dollars of local development out of building ships within Canada, and whether or not we would have gotten more regional development for our dollar had we used the money in another fashion.
I have no particular problem with using major capital projects to perform secondary local development purposes, nor am I particularly enthralled with the prospect of spending lots of money in another country and seeing none of the side benefits. But in any case we must ask whether the extra money we spend sees a real return on our investment, or whether we could have used the difference in a more efficient way somewhere else.
Those are, after all, the kinds of decisions that governments are supposed to make.
Fellow Travellers 
July 13th, 2007 
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