Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Of course, being from the west coast, I've been trying to encourage this committee that a visit to MARPAC would be a good idea, despite the tendency to believe that Esquimalt's a long ways away—although I'm not sure what the point of reference is.
I want to follow up on this question we've been dancing around here, of readiness and sovereignty, and ask about two things. One of those is an increasing tendency for DND to look to contracting out for what some would call routine maintenance facilities for the Canadian navy, for purported short-term savings. The second is the tendencies of suppliers of new equipment to argue that only they can do the maintenance. I guess I want to know if you would share the concerns that many have that, when we do this, we may find at times of crisis that those private suppliers are busy, unavailable, or bankrupt, and therefore not able to provide in a timely manner the service that was originally expected.
So it's a concern about the privatization of existing maintenance services, and then about some of the new equipment coming in the new ships being arguably so complex that we can't do our own maintenance.