This issue is, in my experience, unique to the Canadian surface combatant project.
Essentially, the government said that, in order to build these ships, they were going to pre-select a yard that everybody was going to have to bid with, and they selected, in the case of the large combat ones, Irving. That forced anybody who wanted to bid on this to work with Irving, and that in itself destroyed the typical way of doing business, in which you allow the consortiums to structure themselves and pick their own yard.
Having done that, they made it worse by saying that, now that Irving is going to be the yard, it is also going to be the company that will make these decisions on the statement of requirements: who the integrator will be and which design will be chosen. They're the ones who picked the Type 26 design, which wasn't a proven design. They're the ones who chose Lockheed Martin. They're the ones who are deciding on the statement of requirements.
It's no surprise that the costs have escalated from $26 billion to $77 billion, and it's no surprise that the weight has gone up by 44%, because there are no constraints. There is no budget constraint. All the basic controls that you typically see in a procurement program have been discarded.
I think we're now facing a very serious situation: How do we move forward? I don't think the government is ever going to sign a contract for 15 of these ships under the current rubric. Something is going to have to be done, and I've made my suggestions on how I think it should go forward.