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Sometime this fall, Treasury Board ministers will pass judgment on Department of National Defence (DND) plans to turn over its materiel warehousing and distribution functions to Mission Logistics (www.mission logistics.ca), a private firm based in Canada and owned by Tibbett & Britten Group (www. tibbett-britten.com) in the United Kingdom.
The "static" or non-combat supply system of the Canadian Forces is a $300 million dollar a year business, with almost 1,700 civilian employees and 2,900 military personnel working in depots, warehouses, bases and other installations across Canada.
At the end of August 2001, after several years of planning and consultation with industry, DND announced it had awarded a $5 million contract for start-up work on its Supply Chain Project to Tibbett & Britten Group Canada Inc.
The project was described as ".. an Alternative Service Delivery initiative, designed to re-think the way DND does business in order to focus scarce resources on core military capabilities"
In the spring of 2002, the 12,000-member Union of National Defence Employees (UNDE, www.unde-uedn.com) launched a TV ad campaign aimed at stopping what it considers an ill-advised and poorly-timed experiment in outsourcing.
According to both Emperor Napoleon who said, "An army marches on its stomach," and UNDE National President John MacLennan, logistics is a core function.
"If you take the depot in Montreal, and that's a mega-sized warehouse and if they try to service ValCartier, Bagotville, Petawawa, Trenton, Kingston and Toronto out of that one depot, well, now you're interrupting national security," MacLennan said. Taking the ice storm of 1998 as an example, he said,"All the warehouses in eastern Canada or eastern Ontario were actively involved, including the depot in Montreal, in getting generators out to the public, tents, and all the equipment."
In the event of war or natural disaster, he said, one central depot could easily be knocked out.
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