The simplest way of characterizing the industrial policy is that we're challenged as a nation to send signals to other nations, in particular in terms of our allies, about what we care about in this country and what we want to develop and, to use a term that gets everyone highly agitated, what we want to protect as a strategic asset, a technological asset for the country.
Our failure to signal those priorities means that effectively other countries do that for us. They decide what they'd like to keep and what they'd like to sell us, and we are the fair traders for the rest of the world in terms of defence, which is largely not subject to international trade agreements.
A crazy example that can put it into context for many people in this room is that over the last few years we bought a whole bunch of different American airplanes—C-130s, CH-47s, C-17 Globemasters—that the Canadian Armed Forces needed, but if we'd had a strategy going into it and had said to the Americans that in exchange for purchasing billions of dollars worth of their platforms we wanted to make sure they would buy certain technologies from Canada, this might have been to our great economic benefit.
That's the kind of thing we're talking about when we say we need to be signalling to the rest of the world where our strategic priorities are in terms of the nation.
Another example is that the Prime Minister was visited by France this past week. If I were a betting woman, I'd put money that the French were talking about the Canadian Surface Combatant and their desire to provide a warship design for that Canadian Surface Combatant, which, by the way, represents about $64 billion's worth of spend over the next 15 to 20 years. That is major capital and major investment that can be transformed into valuable jobs for Canadians if we incentivize those foreign primes to look deeper into the Canadian value chain and pick up companies and bring them into that platform design.
Those are a few examples of what an industrial strategy would do. In terms of the actual opportunity, as I said, it is an opportunity of a generation. We haven't had a recapitalization spend of this size in this country in the last 40 years. It's approximately $200 billion. It's bigger than your infrastructure spend, so it's substantial. In just the future fighter aircraft and the Canadian Surface Combatant, for which a RFP is about to be released, we're talking about over half of that expenditure in two programs alone. This could provide tremendous opportunities to drive Canadians into global supply chains and to set apart specific Canadian technologies that we want to have in this country for the long term and that perhaps exist already.
Finally, in terms of the specific Canadian capabilities, we've been participating with ISED in a study on key industrial capabilities in Canada, which I believe is actually circulating with parliamentarians and with upper levels of the public service right now. I would call members' attention to that study, because I do believe it heavily isolates many capabilities we have currently and capabilities we may want in this country.
