Nova Scotia shipyard cheated out of submarine contract by feds says independent MP

Here’s a couple of numbers for you to think about for a bit.
The first is 200. The second is 16 million.
Two hundred is the number of jobs that Nova Scotia will lose to a group of West Coast firms for the refitting of four Victoria-class submarines, including the HMCS Chicoutimi that left for the Left Coast Friday.
Sixteen million is how many dollars it’s estimated taxpayers will have to fork over to get the boat to the other side of the continent.
The Irving-owned Halifax Shipyard has done the maintenance on the subs since Canada bought them from the Brits near the end of the 90s. But two years ago the federal government announced that a British Columbia-based consortium had won the contract to refurbish the subs, a contract worth $1.5-billion that will last 15 years.
Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley MP Bill Casey is no fan of the government’s decision to move the work west.
Unlike political panderers from both sides of the aisle who are too afraid to make waves, Casey speaks his mind and stands up for what he believes in.
The former Progressive Conservative and Conservative Party of Canada MP was booted from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government when he voted against the 2007 Federal Budget.
Casey said that budget was more generous to Nova Scotia than any he’d ever seen, but it broke the Atlantic Accord with his province and Newfoundland and Labrador so he voted against it. The people of his riding respected him for that and he easily won the riding again when he ran as an indepednent last October. Casey’s been critical of moving the sub work to B.C. for years.
"It’s very disappointing that they’re moving the work and the capacity to do the work in the future from Halifax to British Columbia," he told the Halifax Chronicle-Herald last week.
Casey says the tendering process for the sub contract was questionable. Although officials at the Department of Public Works and the Department of National Defense are supposed to follow strict rules when they award these kinds of large contracts, Casey said the Irving Shipyard had the lowest bid and alleges Nova Scotia workers were cheated out of the badly needed work.
"I believe they won the tender call but it was awarded to British Columbia.
"We have 50 years working with subs. They have no experience working with subs in Victoria. And I cannot accept that there were other conditions that make Victoria better,” he said.
And I can’t accept there weren’t personal reasons the work went west.
Harper’s never hidden his disdain for Atlantic Canadians, whether it was telling anyone who would listen we suffered from a “culture of defeat” back in the days when he was still applying for the country’s top job, trying to destroy the Atlantic Accord since he got the job or the 200 jobs his government just took away from Nova Scotians desperate for honest work.
It’s scary to think how so many of us were sent into a rage when a few burnout talk show hosts with a 3 a.m. timeslot said out loud what most Yanks have probably thought of this country for decades, but have no problem with our Prime Minister shoving the knife deep into our collective back, as long as he drops a rubber puck on a frozen pond once in a while.