It was an unbelievable experience, especially bringing all those companies over with us, because they could just sense opportunity over there. South Korea is a natural partner for us. They're like-minded. We can work with them. There's a lot of opportunity there.
Just to circle back to what you just asked, and maybe a bit about what MP Jansen referred to with Mr. Guzman, the primary lens for defence procurement isn't going to be investment. That's an additional lens. We need to build out our economy in a way that we just didn't have to do a year ago. This is very important.
Obviously, the Canadian Armed Forces' requirements are where we start. If they submit requirements, we're going to put on another lens to meet their needs so they can do the jobs we ask them to do. That's what they need.
We're going to put another lens on top of that and ask, if that thing exists in Canada, why would we not buy it from ourselves? We'll give the CAF what they need while we stimulate our own economy to meet the moment because of all this tariff situation and other pressures that are on us economically.
If we don't make it in Canada, can we partner with another nation that shares our values and that we can work with? We'll get our supply chains into their system. Not only can we make sure that we buy something that our supply chains are involved in, but we can get our supply chains into their system, whether that be South Korea or Germany. These are the new lenses of procurement that we have to think about. It's just adding other things that we have to think about, moving forward.
With regard to the sub choice, Canada doesn't make subs. It's buy, build or partner. We're not buying one here, because we don't have one, and we're not building one here. It's not because we don't have the capability; we're super capable. We could build a sub here, but we don't have time, and time is one of the things this agency has to solve for. Who are we going to partner with? This is why we ended up with the options we have, which are Hanwha Ocean, in South Korea, and TKMS, which is a Norway-Germany option.
We had 24 or 25 responses to a request for information on submarines. We quickly down-selected to two. Those two were primarily driven by the requirements of the Royal Canadian Navy. They said to us that these two would satisfy their requirements. They understood that there were other things at play here, but either of these two subs would work for them, so we decided to run a competitive process against the two that met the navy's requirements. That makes both of them very aggressive. They both want this job. They're both putting their best foot forward in terms of bringing our companies into their supply chains. They're making sure, for the in-service support that will be required to look after these subs for the next 30 years—which is 70% of the total cost of this program—that we have the IP to do it in Canada and that there's a Canadian company or companies to look after this sub.
This is exactly what this agency is doing. It's making sure that we get the stuff—the submarine, in this case—to the Canadian Armed Forces quickly. As I said at the beginning, we're going to shave years off this. The public-facing timeline on this before we got involved was a contract awarded in 2028 and subs in the water in 2035. We're going to have subs in the water by 2032. We're probably going to announce a winner this year.
We can get infrastructure going. It will take years to build infrastructure. We need to get people working in this country. There's significant infrastructure on both coasts to support these submarines. That gives us people working. It creates jobs.
