Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Rather than reading my statement, which Mr. Collins has pre-empted with an excellent summary of where we are, I'd just like to mention the two problems that I pointed out in it.
One is that with the length of time now, due to continuing delays and to the basic strategy of trying to stretch out delivery in order to have an ongoing, long-standing defence industry, we're going to start cutting steel for the CSC at a time when the newest patrol frigates will be close to 50 years old. By the time the fleet of 15 frigates is actually delivered, it will be 2045. I think this is going to be a considerable problem to manage, both in terms of naval capability and just in terms of configuration control of what's being built.
Then, finally, there's the question of cost. Right now, there's really no good way to estimate what these ships are going to cost. The Parliamentary Budget Officer, of course, says about $77 billion, but the former director general of the DND program has gone on record as saying we can't really estimate the cost of building these ships until we've built at least three of them. Cost is up in the air.
The defence program as a whole, as the Parliamentary Budget Officer has recently pointed out, is shifting capital procurement to the right in a rather severe way. I think that a huge budget crunch is coming, which is going to be very difficult to manage, and that there will be a capacity problem when DND tries to process all these projects in more or less the same time.
I think those two problems are key: the length of time it's going to take to deliver the fleet and the mounting costs that will have to somehow be managed inside the defence program.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.