In the early 90s I worked on a large Canadian military project. Spent almost a year on the proposal, writing the proposal, pricing and repricing and rewriting the proposal.
After we were awarded the contract we had to renegotiate everything over and over again. That was another six months.
The Canadians wanted a technology we had developed but they wouldn’t let us bid the contract as the prime because we were an American Company,so we teamed with a Canadian company and made them the prime. We did all the engineering and built the hardware.
The Canadians were really assholes during the whole procurement. The terms & conditions were crazy. We were engineering and building the system. But they required us to build 40% of the hardware in Canada. One of our subs was a large military radio manufacturer in the U.S. . We had to get them to move their manufacturing plant to Canada. They built that cost into their radios.
Canadians would only let us take 65% of our profit out of Canada. They had all kinds of requirements for technology transfer from us to them. They wanted a license to sell our system to NATO & other countries. They thought they would be able to buy American Top Secret tech and sell it abroad. That didn’t happen.
The Canadians were all hot about Ada programming so we sent a programmer up there to teach at the university of Saskatchewan for two years. As they kept adding to the Terms & Conditions and we kept adding to the price. We made a good profit on that project.
While writing the proposal we went up to Canada and worked with the prime. The first day we were there all of the Canadians packed up at 4:45 and went home. They were union. We work 12 hr days on proposals.
That experience was how I learned Canadians weren’t our friends. In fact they were just arrogant assholes.
After the project finally got started I told my program manager that I wasn’t going to work on the program. So he funded me to run my own little Internal Research and Development program. I worked on that for a year. It was a nice reward for putting up with all the crap from the Canadians.
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