As I said in my statement, there's the committee of senior public servants from my department, Treasury Board, and National Defence who are working on ways to simplify the process—basically to collapse the fifteen years into something that's far more reasonable. I think seven years is still, frankly, a bit on the long end of it.
One of the ways to do this, to be honest, Mr. Hiebert, is to have fewer specs when we're looking for assets: rather than trying to define every single widget in an airplane, tank, submarine, or whatever, just to come up with larger or macro specs, as we did with the C-17s. I think there were fewer than ten.
In some cases I've seen, there were more than 300 in prior years. It's very difficult when you have 300 specs. People don't agree on the specs, and it takes years and years for all these committees to reach a consensus. Then you go out to the market, and some folks can meet 201 of the 300, and other guys can meet 175, but they're not even the same ones. Frankly, it's a bit of a mess, and we need to streamline this, which is what we've undertaken to do.
