[CaptainCrunch]

In depth story on the pistol replacement shyteshow


https://nationalpost.com/opinion/mat...box=1642181463

There is no better example of our atrophied state capacity — the ability (or lack thereof) for Canadian governments to get stuff done — than our decade-long failure to buy a pistol for the Canadian Armed Forces.
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The Armed Forces use Browning 9mm pistols as its standard-issue sidearm. Some specialized units use other pistols purchased for a specific purpose in smaller batches, but the Browning 9mm is the standard.
It’s a fine pistol, but it has an old design — the first “HiPower,” as they’re branded, was built in 1935. More to the point, the ones the Canadian Forces use were built during the Second World War.
Let’s repeat that for explicit clarity: the pistols in the Canadian military’s inventory were built during the Second World War, which ended, as you may recall, 77 years ago. They are old, they’re worn out, they break down a lot and spare parts are increasingly hard to find.

Canada hasn’t quite lived up to that standard of basic competence, sadly. We first tried to replace the pistols in 2011, a mere, uh, 11 years ago. We failed — the contract was so picky and restrictive, it failed to attract bidders.
In 2016, the government tried again. The proposed budget was between $50- and $100-million. The “anticipated timeline” for the delivery of the new pistols was somewhere between 2026 and 2036 — 10 to 20 years out! To be clear: with a budget of up to $100 million, the Canadian government anticipated needing as much as 20 years to do something the British did in two years for under $15 million.
If that sounds like a disaster in the making, don’t worry. It never happened. That procurement process failed, too. Or, more precisely, it just fizzled and went nowhere, until 2020, when the government said it would move forward, this time with a goal of procuring the pistols in two years — by the end of 2022.
In early 2021, the government had a draft proposal ready, seeking 8,000 pistols by the summer of 2022 (with options for 16,500 more). But then one of the would-be bidders complained that the process was rigged, so it was reviewed, and then, in November, the Canadian International Trade Tribunal agreed that the proposal was inappropriately written, in part.
So the federal government cancelled it, again, and hopes to try again in the spring. Which is just one season before we’d hoped to actually have the guns. (Thanks to the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugilese for his work over the depressingly many years on this file — most of the above timeline was assembled by simply reading through his various reports going back far, far too long.)

But I mean right now the most urgent purchasing need is not new pistols, or figuring out why the ship building process is so messed up, or replacing our fighters, or looking at the soon to be needed sub replacement. Its redesiging our uniforms to be more comfortable and unisex, probably with footie attachments and a matching snuggy or something like that. I expect that Bombardier will win a 6 billion dollar contract to produce new uniforms.