Thank you very much for your question.
You start, quite rightly, with the issue of how requirements are specified and you hold up as an example the United States mission system approach. I would say that the Department of National Defence has made some efforts to move more toward mission system or performance specifications. It is a very difficult and challenging thing, to write a performance specification. If you haven't done a lot of military procurement for a long time—large systems—and if you don't have an internal expertise to be able to do that, you tend to revert to operational specifications or detailed specifications. Then you can indeed come to an answer whereby there is only one product.
A hundred years ago, when I was a junior procurement official in what was then the Department of Supply and Services, working out of a temporary building, I received a contract demand from the Department of National Defence for a piece of equipment, which said it must operate at this speed, it must process data at this rate—so far so good—and it must be painted IBM blue. Well, even as a junior officer, I could see that perhaps they had something specific in mind.
In our world, we are concerned with much larger systems than that. One of the things we've talked about in our proposed process.... First of all, we've encouraged the military to discuss in greater depth what it is they want to do. We'd like to have the opportunity to provide them with more information about our capabilities. And if there were a defence industrial strategy, which we'd most strongly encourage, Canadian industry could also position itself in advance to be able to meet the mission requirements.
In one of our later recommendations, we also say that within Canada we have some very competent what one might call centres of excellence. I think that when we have a centre of excellence, if it can provide the material or the service that is needed, then the government should look first at what it is that centre can provide. They should also consider, if they need to go offshore for that requirement, if there's some way in which the contract might be constructed so that we could have a transfer of knowledge and experience into Canada. That would grow within Canada the knowledge-based jobs and we would ratchet up the technological intensity process.
I agree that we can't do everything. We need to have more things that we can do.
You mentioned the issue of ACANs and letters of intent. Personally, I would rather put our focus on the issue that I discussed first, which is the performance specification. You're quite right that if the performance specification is wired to be IBM blue, then, illustrious though IBM is as a member of ours, if you wire that specification, then PWGSC is constrained in what it can do.