Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Professor Lagassé, for a very thoughtful presentation. As Mr. Christopherson said, it's very helpful.
I take your general point, which is that you either choose now or choose later, but that one way or another you're going to have to choose between having a general ability or a more specialized ability; that's what it boils down to.
I suppose I could argue that this is actually happening through the back door--that over the last five or ten years those choices have been made and that we are not all things to all people at all times and don't have as much of a capability.
We are actually having a kind of mini-conversation around two of the procurements that are in the news these days, for the F-35s and the subs. If I listen to the Prime Minister and the ministers involved—always a dangerous proposition—the $9 billion figure on the F-35s is basically a hard figure, while the military is saying we have to have 65 airplanes. Those two things don't live in the same universe. The government's argument is that by the time we get to it, eventually the price will be down to where we can actually squeeze out 65 airplanes.
It seems to me that this is a kind of mini-conversation on your overall global view that the Canadian military is going to have to decide what it's capable of doing and why it's capable. The big thing that seems to drive this conversation is the stealth capacity. The Rideau folks made the point that we've never actually been at the pointy end of any attack: it's usually been done by others. We've followed up with other things. You can go back through several wars. It seems to me that this is in some respects a bit of a case study for the issues that you are raising.
Similarly with the submarines, the argument is that we need to have them because of the long coastline and all that sort of stuff, but the way the conversation seems to be working out is that if we're going to stay in the sub business, this is all we can essentially afford, and we're going to have to fix these things, regardless of fires and regardless of whether we prang them from time to time on some rock.
I'd be interested in seeing whether you could bring your thinking down from the $35,000 fee to those two specific issues, because in some respects they are case studies of the decisions that this government is going to have to make.