Absolutely.
When I made that statement in a Hill Times piece, my view was that Canada often takes an inordinate amount of time to deliver major systems. The part I think is really problematic is the time that we take compared to our allies, the United States being one. Oftentimes, they're comparable but you have to realize that we're often acquiring off-the-shelf systems, systems that have already been completed. They require minimal modifications in order to get them into Canadian service, whereas if you look at our allies, the United Kingdom or the United States, they take the same amount of time but they're often basically developing systems right off the ground. A system does not exist, and they're basically developing it, feeling it, testing, evaluating and putting it into service in the same amount of time.
A good example was what I was talking about before with the army's air defence program. It's going to take eight years from 2017 to 2025 for Canada to field an air defence system. By comparison the American government in 2015 realized that air defence threats were a major threat towards their soldiers and they put in a program called M-SHORAD. That took three years from the identification of the threat, to development, to the fielding of that capability and putting it into service.
If you look at the range of Canadian procurement programs this is a common thread: it takes us much longer just to acquire systems that already exist, that are already in service and are ready to go.