Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to challenge Mr. Fadden a bit. He said that political opposition has created problems in the past. Looking toward us, I can say that in the last eight years there is only one procurement that the opposition has criticized. That was the purchase of used F-18s from Australia. Both the waste of money and that we don't have the pilots to fly them were the main reasons for doing it, but everything else we have been quiet about, and I can say that I've received criticism for not being political enough in trying to move some of these procurements forward.
That being said, I'm looking at General Foster, and at you, Mr. Fadden and Dr. Shimooka. You guys have all written about this in the past. The department itself was in here last week talking about procurement and actually criticized industry for not moving fast enough, or they aren't going to build stuff if nobody is going to buy it, or they don't have stuff that the world wants, like 155-millimetre munitions that we could be doing right now north of Montreal.... We have other facilities that build stuff that the world needs right now, including Canada.
DND often takes a long time in defining the procurement and then changes the goalposts and keeps moving them down the field, like we've seen on the surface combatant, as a good example, and adding time and delays. We still don't have a final blueprint to actually go out there and start cutting steel at Irving. How can we fix that process?
General Foster, you talked about better co-operation between industry and CAF, but it's also within the department to ensure that we are addressing things in a more expedient manner. Is it industry's fault? Is it the department's fault? Is it that the generals and admirals are not getting things right or have too big a wish list that might make things impossible?