Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
First, I want to welcome the Minister of National Defence.
Honourable Minister, you said in your presentation that a new day is dawning for the Canadian Forces and your entire speech had a sense of urgency about it.
We think that we are perhaps at the beginning of a new era for Quebec and Canadian taxpayers, if we look at the way you are currently proceeding. The Bloc Québécois is highly critical of what is going on. Let me explain.
First of all, defence procurement must be based on a defence policy. Then we can see what kind of material we need to implement the policy. This is called the Defence Capabilities Plan.
You are announcing purchases in the amount of $21 billion and we have not even seen the Defence Capability Plan yet. And I object to the manner in which you announce this! Minister, it is up to your department to choose the type of contract. You chose to award a contract to Boeing. This means that no other company had an opportunity. With regard to Boeing, I am not only talking about the C-17s, but also about the Chinook helicopters. This contract is even more costly than the C-17 contract.
The contract was announced in July 7, during the Farmborough International Air Show. By the way, at that time, everyone was away on vacation. I called the companies and I told them that we were not aware of this, that we had not heard anything about it. Let me quote the contract award:
You are hereby notified that the Crown intends to solicit a bid for the above requirement and negotiate a contract with The Boeing Company, the only known source of supply capable of meeting the high level mandatory capability requirements.
Contract awards are the first problem because it is not a fair, just and open procedure. You get into bed with a company and tell it that we want aircraft.
I already told this anecdote to the defence committee. When I wanted to buy my first car, my father said that he would come with me. I had seen an extraordinary red Camaro convertible—Mr. Chairman, I swear to heaven that today, I would certainly choose a blue one—and I liked it. When we got to the garage, my father told me that he would let me do this in my own way. I told the salesman that I wanted the car, but this is the one I wanted and no other car. My father then told me that we had to leave. When we got outside, he told me to let him take care of this and watch how he went about it. We went to three different garages. He told the salesman that he might want to have a car for his son and asked him the price, without omitting to say that we had been to other places and that the prices were excellent.
If you say that you want to deal exclusively with Boeing, you can no longer negotiate anything with that company. We lose our negotiation leverage.
You have another way of choosing the supplier you want, namely the requirements. For instance, if you say that you want a freight capacity of 39 tonnes and not 19.5 tonnes, you automatically get rid of all those you do not want and you keep those that you want. These are basic principles. There is also the delivery schedule. By requiring a delivery schedule, you can eliminate more candidates.
Let us take the 15-year contract that you mentioned earlier. We had to wait for 15 years before getting Sikorsky marine helicopters. The Sikorskys will not be delivered on time. There will be a five-and-a-half-week delay and you are supposed to penalize them $100,000 for each day that they are late. Now you said that you would not do that. What kind of message does this send to Boeing? You have eliminated candidates because of the delivery schedule, but you will not penalize anyone if there is a delay.
You can see, Minister, that there is a major problem. The department told the American companies that they could do whatever they like, and that if they wanted to apply the ITARs, they could do so. By the way, a Venezuelan junior employee was fired by Bell Helicopter. This junior employee was not fired because of incompetence, but because he was working on specific projects that the Americans wanted to keep secret from people coming from 20 countries that they had listed.
You gave the companies whatever they wanted. The ITARs are a good example of this. You told them that they could build their aircraft wherever they choose. This is serious, because 60% of the aerospace industry is in Quebec and we will have to be satisfied with half of the spinoffs, and perhaps even less. You also told them that they could deliver whenever they wanted to, except in the Sikorsky case.
You are right, Mr. Minister, if you want the taxpayer to get his money's worth, we cannot wait 15 years. However, there is a difference between buying immediately something of the shelf and waiting for 15 years. You chose to skew the balance completely to one side. This is not in the taxpayers' interest.
You can understand why we are put off by this, as we showed last Friday.
I would like you to tell me that I should begin my intervention in this way, that I am entirely right and that the next time, we will not do it in this way.