In February 2013, then Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page requested from DND basic information on the surface combatant project: the most current budget and a non-classified outline of the requirements for the new ships. The request sparked significant efforts inside DND to limit what information the PBO was given, according to the documents obtained by this newspaper.
Bureaucrats exchanged emails warning each other about providing Page with any type of information that he didn’t specifically request. Some officials were tasked to scour previous releases of public information on the CSC so the PBO wouldn’t be given anything that hadn’t been provided already to journalists. A number of emails from department officials warned about the “adverse effects” that might arise if the PBO received too much information.
Navy officers also tried to claim they had no cost estimates or budget for the CSC and because of that they couldn’t provide such information to the PBO. (That assertion was false as the CSC budget had already been established as $26.2 billion.)
The Liberals, who had called out the Conservative government’s previous attempts to stonewall the PBO on CSC information, were silent.
In fact, the Liberal government took a number of new initiatives to crack down on what information was available. Gag orders were issued in 2016 and later in 2019 by Public Services and Procurement Canada, banning industry officials from firms interested in bidding on CSC from talking to journalists about the project. Officials at PSPC, DND, as well as those at Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, also would, at times, warn Irving representatives about reporters who were asking questions about shipbuilding.
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