Public Accounts committee  The result's quite important here. At the end of the day, while you have multiple approaches from the SAR, from DND, and from us, the interesting thing is they all end up in a similar result for the life cycle costs pro-rated for a 30-year period. We think this is pretty importan

Public Accounts committee  The program has had well-publicized cost overruns and delays. But one of the advantages is that we now have some useful reference points. We've recommended that parliamentarians at least consider that figures coming out of the selected acquisition report, plus reports from the U.

Public Accounts committee  Let me just add, and Mr. Hawn has said this in the past, that if you actually take the total acquisition pie and divide it by 65, you are actually looking at $138 million allocated per aircraft. If you keep quoting the $75 million, which is a fly-away cost, it risks understating.

Public Accounts committee  We spent a lot of time with people who worked with the F-22 Raptor—retired Pentagon officials, the GAO, the Rand Corporation—a lot of people who have a great deal of expertise over generations of fighter aircraft. In particular, one of the reasons we collaborated with the firm in

Public Accounts committee  Actually, sir, a lot of the advice we got was in terms of the patterns, as Mr. Page said earlier, that were emerging in terms of development. There was a lot of expert advice that said that in fact it's not as unique as one might think. We've talked about different generations of

Public Accounts committee  Yes. The Selected Acquisition Report of the United States Department of Defense states that it is quite significant. This is on slide 7 in the deck we provided to committee members. The Department of Defense says that the operating and required personnel costs associated with the

Public Accounts committee  The difference is significant. The original hypothesis was that this aircraft would cost more or less the same as the aircraft it replaced. The United States Department of Defense has concluded that this aircraft is quite costly in comparison to the aircraft it is replacing. This

Public Accounts committee  Sir, if I just may say, we're principally trying to respond to our report and our methodology. So your point is well taken. There may be other approaches. But we used 30 years for very specific reasons: because it's the estimated service life based on the U.S. Department of Defen

Public Accounts committee  Can you repeat the question, please?

Public Accounts committee  For our methodology, we applied the practices for the procurement of military products that are normally used in the United States. Their Department of Defense uses 30 years as its base period. This corresponds to the lifespan of an F-18, according to the manufacturer's estimated

Public Accounts committee  The request of the Standing Committee on Finance was quite specific. It asked for life cycle costs. It is important because, in the Department of National Defense guide, life cycle costs are defined. Receiving partial information makes things more difficult. In the course of our

Public Accounts committee  It would have allowed us to do a better comparison between the two and between the other estimates provided by other international bodies. This study of estimates lacks precision. So complete costs are very important in determining if the costs are really reasonable. In this case

Public Accounts committee  I would add that two weeks prior to the publication of the report, we had asked for clarification from the department on the partial information we received. Specifically, item number one on the list of a number of items was operating and support. We wanted further clarification

Public Accounts committee  Sir, we actually made a number of requests after the finance committee motion to get additional details. We have these actually published on our website.

Public Accounts committee  Actually, sir, we have not been provided with the details of the modelling exercise. The response we had was that they were using information provided by the project office.