Stalling on military trucks costly, feds warned; Opposition calls it ‘pathetic’

OTTAWA – The Harper government has been warned that the longer it waits to buy 1,500 replacement trucks for the military, the fewer vehicles it will be able to afford.

The unusually blunt caution from National Defence is included in newly disclosed internal documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

The assessment of the medium support vehicle program, cancelled twice since 2006, was delivered in a memo to the former deputy minister of defence just weeks after the Department of Public Works pulled the plug on a 2012 bid.

The documents show that most recent decision to halt the program came as a direct result of budget cuts at National Defence.

The program was quietly restarted last year, but a contract likely won’t be awarded before the summer of 2015, an election year — a delay that could chew as much as $48 million of buying power out of the program.

New Democrat defence critic Jack Harris says the documents show the timing of a relatively straightforward truck purchase has been hijacked by politics.