Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Minister, defence procurement has been a problem for several years. As was indicated in the mandate letters, in 2019, your government wanted to unify defence procurement, but that was taken away, and now we don't really know what's going on.
I will give you an example of a major problem. We all want to increase defence budgets to 2% of GDP, as the NATO countries have committed to do. At the same time, we see that money is often spent unnecessarily. Think, for example, of the issue of the construction of offshore patrol vessels. Originally, it was five ships at a cost of $400 million each. Things were going well, so the government wanted a sixth. Suddenly, the cost of each ship went up to $800 million. Now we learn that the total bill has gone from $2.8 billion to $4.3 billion. When we ask what justifies this $1.5 billion increase, we are told somewhat lightly that it must be because of COVID‑19.
Minister, is there any way that Canada can get defence equipment at a good price and stop having cost increases that seem to come out of nowhere and are hard to justify?