Canada squanders over $1 billion preparing to build ships -- No more bankrolling bloated corporate boondoggles!

Back in August 2019, I took a look at how it seems that there is always money to bail out major corporations and pander to corporate interests -- as when the Trudeau government instantly found $4.5 billion to buy the Trans Mountain Pipeline -- yet meeting basic human needs is somehow deemed unaffordable as in the case of building desperately needed housing in Nunavut.

Now we learn that the feds have also squandered over $1 billion dollars during the last seven years in what amounts to massive corporate welfare around the building of new frigates and supply ships for the Canadian navy. CBC News revealed that this staggering sum was spent "design and preparatory contracts" and was split between two private companies, "Irving Shipbuilding in Halifax, the prime contractor for the new frigates, and Seaspan of Vancouver, the builder of the supply ships."

Not a single ship, at this point, has been built. That will be costing us all many billions more.

Astoundingly, "Irving Shipbuilding was given $136 million to support the drawing up of the design tender for the new frigates and to pay for the shipbuilding advice Irving was giving the federal government throughout the bidding process". This is for ships that Irving was awarded the contract to build!

Despite us being sold a line for decades now how inefficient and unnecessary the public service is, it turns out that "Years ago, the federal government had enough in-house expertise to dispense with private sector guidance — but almost all of that expertise was lost over the past two decades as successive federal governments cut the defence and public works branches that would have done that work."

Better to just hand over all that money to private companies to advise us in how to get them to build us ships, right?

Meanwhile, of course, we are regularly told that the money simply is not there to fast track the building of public housing through a national housing strategy, or the creation of universal pharma or dental care, or any number of other human projects that don't excite Bay St. or CEOs in Calgary, Halifax, Vancouver or wherever else they may be found.

$23 million of that 163 would surely have been better spent on upgrading the water system for the Oneida Nation of the Thames whose people have been under a five month long boil water advisory and where an entire generation has grown up having to drink bottled water.

Their non-Indigenous neighbours just down the road have not had any drinking water issues at all.

It really is time to stop handing out billions of dollars to private interests to bankroll bloated boondoggles -- with little serious public oversight of how the money is spent  -- on projects that magically seem to cost more every time we look.

If the public money is there to endlessly subsidize or directly fund pipelines like Coastal GasLink or Trans Mountain, or to spend over a billion just to prepare to build ships, then the money is there to dramatically improve the lives of people in communities across the country not just in some mythical distant future, but right now.