Thanks, Chair.
I'm in support of this. I think we should try to get as much as possible from this. This is not like a regular boondoggle; this is like an uber-boondoggle.... If anyone remembers, going back, this is the one that famously had a 30,000-page RFP that they had to rent a van to deliver. We, the government—not us, but the Government of Canada—got sued by Leonardo over improper practices on this bid.
Leonardo then miraculously withdrew the lawsuit in exchange for a $5-billion sole source contract for maintenance, and now, we find, as I understand, it's up to a 10-year delay to get these planes.
Is it the Hercules they're using right now? I don't think for our Hercs that (a) we have enough; I don't think they're going to be available to cover Comox and the east coast for 10 years. I don't want to go hyperbolic, but this is a real crisis in procurement, and it's not Liberal side, Conservative side, NDP side: This is a problem with this really specific problem.... The shipbuilding is a mess, but this one is, like, beyond a mess, with all of the controversies and everything else from day one of this contract. I think we owe it to the forces and fishermen, etc.—east coast, west coast—and taxpayers to really look into this. I would almost be open to saying that we should have a couple of stand-alone meetings on this.
If you read their report, it's gone from that they should be flying right now to “maybe 2030”. It's not like a one- or two-year delay. They're pushing us back a decade. I think we should get all the documents and then go from there to see what is causing all of this. This is a mature design. This is not like the T26, where we're starting from scratch. This is in service in 15 or 20 different countries, and it's a large contract. There's no way in the world that this should be delayed to this extent. I think we have a real big problem on our hands here, and we owe it to Canadians and to ourselves to look into it.
I understand the difficulty of gathering all of this. Maybe there's some solution that can be suggested and we can chat about it a bit more on Friday, but I think this is something that we seriously have to look at: what's causing these massive delays and these cost overruns and, I think, the fact that we're saying these planes cannot be adjusted for what the specs are.
Anyway, I appreciate the time and some thoughts about that and suggestions on how we should approach this, whether it's full-on docs or if it's having someone come specifically on the project, but I think this is a real big issue that we need to tackle.