Thank you, Ms. Thompson. It's a great question.
“Off the shelf” gets thrown around a lot as a general solution to all of Canada's procurement woes, but in reality, it covers up a lot of minute details that dictate the timetable, time frames and costs of buying “off the shelf”. Essentially, when you say buying off the shelf, you can mean, literally, a ship that's already in service or just about to enter service and it's just sitting there. That's something that the Egyptians do very well, so they end up with a fleet of very different classes of ships and they can't really train or maintain them really well.
In most cases, off the shelf means you're buying a design that's already in existence. It seems simple enough on its own, but even for a ship, there are multiple design stages. Which stage of that design are we talking about when we're saying off the shelf? Is it the very beginning, where you say, “This is what it looks like this, what can it do?”, or is it the second stage, where you know what it's supposed to look like and what it's supposed to do, but not how you are going to get there? What are the literal nuts and bolts, steel plates, equipment and the pumps that are going to make that drawing, that concept into a real, vessel?
Finally, you have to give the shipyard instructions to put it all together.
When you say “off the shelf”, which stage of those three are you really looking at? The further back you go, the longer it's going to take and the more it's going to cost.
Even for a ship like the JSS, the joint support ship that's being built in Vancouver, that was technically an off the shelf solution. It was based off of a ship that the Germans had already built and already had in service. You think, “Oh well, that's super easy and it should be super basic to convert it into something we can build here”. In actuality, there are all sorts of design considerations when you're building in a different country, versus your own, that are incorporated into the design itself that you then have to go back and readapt into our own industries and our own capabilities. That's one thing.
The second thing is, of course, the time period. It's been roughly 15 or 20 years since that original design was created. A lot of things have changed in regulations and proper survivability and habitability requirements for our navy. All these things have to be worked back into that original design.
I would argue that in some cases, working from a clean sheet design is easier than modifying an existing one, just because you have much more room to say right from the outset where you want things to be and how they should be.