Lockheed is Still Knocking on Ottawa's Door.

Lockheed has pretty much scraped the barrel for customers to buy its flawed and compromised stealth light bomber, the F-35, but the company still has Canada in its sights.

When any manufacturer starts working on a new product, the old designs at the end of the production line lose a bit of lustre. Asking prices slip. Customers expect more generous terms.  When it comes to the F-35, Lockheed delivers.

So eager is America's biggest military aircraft company to secure Canada's business that it's now guaranteeing to deliver $16.9 billion in industrial benefits to the Canadian economy. $17 billion on a $19 billion package, not bad. 

Still it's a lot of money for an airplane that's not really designed to meet Canada's needs. It doesn't have much internal space for goodies such as bombs and missiles. It doesn't have supercruise. If you give it a conventional load out with extra fuel tanks and ordinance slung under the wings and fuselage, it's not stealthy nor does it perform as showcased.

It may not even be stealthy anymore. The F-35s intended adversaries, Russia and China, have had two decades to get up to snuff on stealth technology. They have their own stealth aircraft. They've also had oodles of time to develop systems to pierce Lockheed's stealth cloaking.  Okay, well, that was bound to happen sooner or later.

When the order book closes on the F-35, we'll see what American designers have been working on in recent years - their sixth generation fighters and bombers.  New designs that will address the defects and shortfalls of the F-35. Suddenly nearly-new could look pretty shabby.  But I digress.

There was a time when $16.9 billion sounded like a huge amount of money. H-u-u-u-ge. Crazy big. Only not so much anymore. It's almost exactly the amount of money Canada will be out of pocket by the time the Justin Trudeau Memorial Pipeline, a.k.a. the Trans-Mountain pipeline expansion is completed in 2022.

The upfront cost was $4.5 billion Canada overpaid to Kinder Morgan for the sclerotic old pipeline when KM was about to shut the whole thing down.  Then, in February, we learned that construction costs would be 70 per cent higher than the federal government estimated. The project would cost $12.6 billion, not the $7.4 billion the Trudeau government originally claimed. That's $12.6 billion atop the original $4.5 billion

Not to worry, said FinMin Bill Morneau.  Once the feds finished the project the private sector wouldn't touch, they would come to their senses. They would flock to Ottawa with lucrative competing bids to get their hands on the Trans Mountain pipeline. Then we would see who was really over the barrel.

A lot has happened since February. The price of oil has plummeted and isn't expected to return to levels that make bitumen profitable. The industrial money  - investors, major insurers, foreign energy companies - have quietly bailed out.  Not sure who is going to cover the cost of remediating Alberta's giant northern Love Canal but that, and the thousands of orphan wells to the south  carries an estimated cost of $230 billion.

Suddenly throwing $19 billion Lockheed's way for an outdated, deeply flawed, first-strike light bomber doesn't seem like such a horrendous amount of money. It's right in Ottawa's sweet zone - for boondoggles.