Your statement that the problem is ideological in nature is pretty loaded. In addition, the idea came from the government in power, which dropped it two years later.
Although I would like the issue to be resolved, I have no choice but to do politics, as we are also here for that.
It is clear to you that, up until a month ago, before the war in Ukraine, the Liberal government had no intention to invest in defence, and that is why everything has been dragged out. It is pretty serious.
We also talked about cost overruns. At the time, when the Conservative government implemented the naval strategy, it did so to greatly improve efficiency. It adopted that strategy to enable shipyards to build equipment, plan and get budgets, so that progress would be made.
We could say there is now a perverse effect to all that. Mr. Williams talked about it. There are cost overruns, and there seems to be no control over those overruns. For instance, the first five Arctic and offshore patrol ships, the famous AOPSs, cost $400 million each. The government ordered a sixth one, which cost $800 million. There were costs associated with that additional $400 million, but we don't know what they were. The total came up to $2.8 billion. Yet we recently learned that the cost at that shipyard has come up to $4.3 billion. The only answer we are being given is that COVID-19 is to blame.
Mr. Leuprecht, is this not an example of abuse?