Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Welcome. I want to get back to a topic that was raised earlier, and that's the shipbuilding program itself. Obviously, you don't commit $33 billion to the economy of Canada without having some massive impact.
I noticed that recently, bank economists declared that it would be worth 1.5% growth to the Nova Scotia economy alone in the coming years, year over year. It's a substantial part of that province. I'm also aware that one of the companies that has picked up some of the contracting, separate from this, just committed $50 million to $60 million in P.E.I. It's unrelated to shipbuilding, but because they're there, they wanted to grow into the economy. I also know that a number of small shipbuilding firms have really captured both the atmosphere, I guess you could say, and the opportunity, particularly in Europe in a number of ways with the smaller ships. They're looking forward to the $2 billion that will be spent on maintenance and so on.
I don't know how this will be calculated going forward, but obviously there will be a few glitches, if you want to discuss those. I think the big thing here that we have to talk about is the massive impact this has over a 25- to 30-year span on the economy and the spinoffs. I know a number of small companies. I went to a number of the briefings around the province to have the economic side talk about it. A lot of the small companies that had nothing to do with shipbuilding and nothing to do with engineering realized that if they could get a subcontract, in other words, if they spent the money and invested and geared up, they would be pretty well guaranteed work for a long time, for 20 to 25 years. Many of them said it was incredibly unusual to be able to bid and make that kind of investment in terms of growing the small firms. I noticed that the number is 200 or 300, but whatever the number of companies is, these are spread across the country.
I wonder if you could elaborate on that and talk about some of the impacts that maybe you notice more at the staff level or which you anticipate.