Conservatives face big opposition to F-35s

The Hill Times:



Parliament Hill - Despite two months of trying to extract itself from the furor over plans to spend an estimated $25-billion on a fleet of F-35 stealth fighter jets, the Conservative government continues to face overwhelming public opposition over the controversial project.

Even a majority of Conservative Party supporters who are aware of the project favours other options than replacing Canada’s aging CF-18 fighter jets with the sophisticated and costly F-35s, according to a Forum Research poll.

The only place in Canada where support for the project has grown significantly since Auditor General Michael Ferguson released a highly critical report of the F-35 procurement at the beginning of April was Alberta, the survey this week found.

Nationally, only 21 per cent of voting age Canadians who were aware of the plan to buy the stealth fighters said the purchase should go ahead as planned.

Fully 66 per cent of Canadians who are aware of the F-35 acquisition said they believe the government misled Parliament and the Canadian public over the true costs of its purchase and maintenance—a minimum total of $25.1-billion over the next 20 years.

Although support for the F-35s has grown among respondents who declared the Conservative Party as their federal party preference, 57 per cent of the Conservative Party supporters preferred other options than the F-35 or didn’t know what the government should do.

The survey conducted on Wednesday, May 23 found a majority of the public at odds with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) government on another key front for the Conservatives—their attack against environmental groups with charitable tax status who have been lobbying against the Enbridge Inc. proposal to build a controversial pipeline to carry oilsands bitumen across Northern British Columbia for shipment to China and other Asian countries.

More than half of those who were surveyed, 51 per cent, said they believe the government should bar foreign oil companies from energy board hearings into the Enbridge plan and only 38 per cent said they believed foreign environmental groups should be barred from the hearings. Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver (Eglinton Lawrence, Ont.) has claimed “radical” Canadian environmentalists campaigning against the pipeline are financed by foreign groups that want to intervene.

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