CBH99, there is a trail of this information available publicly, including some presentations that were released back in the day, some in officially archived GoC material, some through investigative reporting, etc., just that most people just don’t care at the time since it isn’t an issue for most. Some people have out this all together, like CGAI’s David Perry, arguably the most knowledgeable external-to-CAF SME to be found, regarding Canadian military procurement. Others do a decent job on augmenting details to known challenging procurements, Murray Brewster and the like, and even some others get some isolated facts right.
The biggest issue for the current Chinooks, most of it back in pre-MHLH days, ie. TALC, then the early days of MHLH (2006-ish) when there was a pocket of criticism that the system was rigged for the Chinook. The MCRs were developed to capture the enduring requirements that the helicopter would need in service with the RCAF supporting CAF ops globally. The potential contenders were assessed and as previously noted, were eliminated. The government then issued an ACAN (Advance Contract Award Notice) in 2006, notifying its intent to procure the Chinook. Public records confirm that only Augusta-Westland challenged PWGSC’s ACAN, but it was a puffed up chest kind of thing, because its argued product, the EH-101, could not lift the Army’s M-777. AW withdrew its challenge, or PWGSC just said ‘sorry’, I can’t recall which, and the Government THEN proceeded to announce a sole-source procurement based on there only being one compliant bidder - Boeing. Those docs were all on MERX at the time. I’m not sure if they still are. A good reference MHLH project quad chart (also attached below) that remains archived in the Canada.gc.ca site at
https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/dnd-mdn/documents/quad-charts/mhlh-quad-chart-en.pdf
Apologies to those wishing to discuss the Future Fighter Capability Project, but I figured there is some tangentially-related applicability to being informed on the process to the degree that heresay (well intentioned, or for other reasons) could do with some firm facts and framework of how it all went down back in the day. I could get into FFCP in greater detail as well, but will save that for another day. Its political factors in play make the Chinook look like a very simple procurement (which, for a $5B project, it actually was).
I’m quite comfortable in opining that even if we had never gone to Afghanistan, we would have CH-147F Chinook helicopters today.
Regards
G2G
throwing ‘Development’ into the ID-OA-Def’n-Impl-CloseOut spectrum. Some of us informally called the second half of Def’n as Development, but technically there is only Definition Phase before Implementation Phase.
