Government Operations Committee on June 9th, 2016

[RAdm Patrick Finn]

Yes.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

—in Seaspan to get them up to capability.

[RAdm Patrick Finn]

For capacity, not for infrastructure. It's for capacity, so—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

But you're splitting hairs here.

[RAdm Patrick Finn]

No, I'm not. I'm not—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

It's a simple question. There's almost $10 million just in this one part, and there's another $40 million here, but Mr. Muldoon says there's almost $10 million of taxpayers' money going into a project where we've very clearly stated, for very many years, that there would not be public money going—

[RAdm Patrick Finn]

Into the infrastructure of the yard, into the projects themselves, to actually advance work on the project, so we created a—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

That's what this says, so they're getting money to get the project going faster.

[RAdm Patrick Finn]

They are getting money to work on the projects. They are getting money—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

They are not supposed to get money—

[RAdm Patrick Finn]

No, they are supposed to get money to build the ships in advance—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Right, but not additional money to get them up and running.

[RAdm Patrick Finn]

Yes. It's not additional money. We're advancing work, so rather than wait—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

It's a progress payment is what you're claiming....

[RAdm Patrick Finn]

It's not a progress payment.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Once again, I'm sorry to interrupt, but could we please at least allow.... You may not agree with the answer—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Sure, okay.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

—but could we at least allow the witnesses to give an answer?

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

We're short on time. That's why I just don't want to get back to—

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

We'll be getting shorter on time if we keep getting interjections, so could we have an answer in one minute, Mr. Finn.

[RAdm Patrick Finn]

Very quickly, if I could, then, it's not infrastructure. It's actually not progress payments. It's actually advancing specific work on the projects horizontally to benefit all the projects. It's work that would otherwise be done in an inefficient way in each project. We created the horizontal ability to actually improve taxpayers' value for money and to actually advance work to succeed in a long-term build program for the yard.

[Lisa Campbell]

Mr. Chair, if I may, I'll put it in really plain language, because it is a kind of fundamental shipbuilding principle.

Normally in shipbuilding you'd build a long run of many of the same kind of ship, and the client department would pay at the beginning. It would say, “All right, do the engineering that we want you to do on the first ship and then do it again for all the others and achieve your shipbuilding efficiencies.”

The build program that we have asked the Vancouver shipyard to do, as I said at the outset, is several small runs of different kinds of ships—three, two, one, one, and one—for two client departments. What we've said at the very beginning is to do this engineering in standard processes and then use it again on every single ship build. This means that Canada is both gaining efficiencies and standardization and saving money.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

We're paying money to save money. Okay.

How much money altogether are we going to be saving by giving money to them? We've seen about $70 million so far. How much more?

[RAdm Patrick Finn]

I believe the contract is for $40 million. It is, again, work that otherwise would have been done later or probably at greater cost, so it's actually advancing work in each of those projects. It's done earlier, so it is not in addition to any of the work that would have been done in any of the projects.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Well, yes, but what we see is a cost increase. We haven't seen any of the costs of those ships diminish.

Mr. Chair, I'm not really satisfied with the answers we got today. I wish that we could find ways to get a clearer explanation on this program and a convincing demonstration that taxpayer money is being well served by the execution of the strategy.