It was a lot of rebuilding, really, from the ground up.
I'm trying to stay within the confines of the study you're doing, but I have shipbuilding procurement people in front of me and I have to raise some concerns.
The shipbuilding strategy started off as a floor in terms of what our needs were, and now it has suddenly become a ceiling. Nobody can imagine we would get more than the number of ships that were the absolute minimum that were in the strategy. It's become about the dollars instead of about the ships. That floor was what we absolutely needed, and suddenly the shipbuilding strategy is the money and how many ships we can get for that, so we've had a kind of slippage there in our understanding of that strategy.
The timelines were originally set out to try to maintain our capacities, and now that's slipped to—I'll be as charitable as I can—filling immediate gaps. We saw that with the tender ships, where we're now having one refit, and we're contracting with the Spanish armada and doing all kinds of stopgap things that end up costing us quite a lot of money outside the money that was allocated.
All of those really don't fit so well into this study, but I think one does. One of the purposes for shipbuilding was to create stability and predictability in the shipyards around the country so we would have that viable industry that would support our military, but also support good jobs in Canada. I have to say the problem we're having now with the strategy is that predictability for a lot of the potential employment is lost.
When the frigate refit was finished in my riding, 250 people were laid off. The idea was we would be at a certain place in the shipbuilding strategy and we wouldn't lose.... It's not just the worry or concern about families, which I do have, but it's also the capacity you lose. You have skilled teams built up to do that work, and if you don't have that stability and predictability in the industry, they will disperse. Then you have people scrambling trying to restore that capability.
I guess I was really asking for a procurement view, but anybody who wants can respond to that. How are we doing on that goal of the shipbuilding strategy of creating that stable and secure industry that doesn't go through boom and bust?