Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for appearing here today, and to your officials as well.
We've had the Minister of National Defence here, and we've had the Minister of Public Works and Government Services as well, and neither of them has indicated that he is the lead minister responsible for defence procurement. It's very hard to find out which minister takes the final responsibility on all of this.
I want to ask you if you consider yourself to be the minister who is responsible for industrial regional benefits.
Further to the contract on the C-17s, for every dollar that's spent on maintenance in the U.S., I would like to know how many dollars will be spent in Canada. So regardless of who those dollars are paid to in the U.S., whether it's the U.S. Air Force or to U.S. industry, what is the ratio of those dollars to the dollars that will be spent in Canada, exactly?
My final question in the first round is what your own role, your personal role, has been in determining the industrial regional benefits. In this contract, the Agreement on Internal Trade does not apply, because the national security exemption was invoked, so I think it's even more important to understand exactly how the regional industrial benefits have been determined.