Madam Speaker, I asked a question with respect to the F-35 costs back on January 31, and frankly it does seem to be light years away since January 31. We have since had the Auditor General's report, and the PBO is working on some form of attempted reconciliation between what the government chooses to tell us and what the realities are.
Ironically, at this stage, the PBO, the AG, and the cabinet are all roughly in agreement as to what the costs are. Why we have had to go through this horrible exercise of trying to drag out of the government the actual full life cycle costs of this asset, the F-35, is beyond me. There is really no dispute as to what is the way to do full life cycle costing. It is set out in the U.S. congressional handbook, in the U.K. handbook and even in our own handbook.
When the finance committee passed its motion back in 2010, which ultimately led to the dissolution of the previous Parliament and the fall of the government, it was clearly and completely known what the full life cycle costs were. Here we are, just over a year later, still dragging this information out through the nose of the government of the day. We would not be dragging it out through the nose if the government had been upfront with the Canadian people.
The Minister of Defence kind of fell into it this week when he said that the cabinet knew that it would be $25 billion. The cabinet was not misled. It knew there was this $10 billion gap between what Canadians and Parliament knew and what the full life cycle costs were, which is in line with what the PBO said. It is clearly in line with what the AG said. Therefore, the AG, cabinet and the PBO all knew what the right figure was. The only people who did not actually know what the correct figure was were the people of Canada and the Parliament of Canada.
We are almost there in agreeing on the actual number. It is a pity that we have to go through this level of confusion and these repetitive questions in question period, the castigating of anyone who actually tries to speak truth to power. I was witness to a shameful exhibition by the Conservative members on the finance committee, ridiculing the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who as we know is more frequently right than he is wrong.
I thought it was kind of ironic yesterday to have the deputy minister of defence actually say, when asked by another member about the two sets of books being run, that the column on the left hand side went to cabinet for decision making. In other words, that is the truthful column, the $25 billion column. The government decided to communicate the other number, the acquisition costs and sustainment costs with another number. He went on to say that they worked off the left hand column and that the right hand column was how they responded to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. In other words, mislead, mislead, mislead. It is the modus operandi of the government.