Let me start on a few things in a random order
First of all, in terms of the transcripts, my point is more than transcripts. It's not so much my opening statement and Doug's that I'm thinking of. But given your limited resources, I would expect that one of your researchers would interview witnesses well before, beyond our statement, question and challenge and bring that back to this committee so that you have substantive information upon which to further.... It's not just the opening statements; it's beyond that. That's point number one.
With regard to why the Minister of National Defence, in the book I did present five different.... The agency itself, Defence Procurement Canada, can report to the Minister of National Defence, it can report to the Minister of Public Works, it can report to a third minister, and there are administrative options within that. I chose it for the one reason that I have been talking about all along: I think it's important that one minister is being held accountable. The same minister who's accountable for the statement of requirements would be the Minister of National Defence; otherwise you split it.
You also have a human resource issue, because many of the resources within this organization will be military, and it's a lot easier for human resource management, frankly, to move these military people back and forth between this organization and the army, navy, or air force organization in a more seamless kind of way. This gets to Monsieur Bachand's point a little bit too. In the book I do comment that the deputy minister and myself thought we had an agreement at one point in time with Public Works to try this, but it got snafued. At some point in time you ask how often you are going to bang your head against the wall to make this happen.
This committee, under Pat O'Brien's chairmanship, also made the recommendation that this be looked at, but the government response was no, we don't think we ought to. As a player in the system, once a government makes that decision, that decision is made, and it would be inappropriate for me to challenge it.
There are a lot of procurements in the pipeline right now. The last thing I would suggest we do is hold them up. They warrant appropriate debate and discussion, and I think it's appropriate that we go about doing them the right way. As I said in my comments, the right way doesn't mean a long period of time, and the biggest delays are in getting approval. To give the government full credit, if it said it wants to buy tactical lift, strategic lift, and heavy lift helicopters, that's great. That eliminates one huge obstacle. Once that's done, let's move quickly through the front door, and not try to find a back door to go through. That would take, in my estimation, more time, so I wouldn't delay it.
In terms of fixed-wing search and rescue, this is an interesting case study, because you may recall that in 2004 money was put in the defence budget in the order of $1 billion or $1.3 billion to buy them, with the view that this is something we can do quickly. Here we are three years later, and nothing has been done. One of the major reasons for this is that in developing the requirements it seemed to me there was a tendency to try to make this skewed for one aircraft over the other. Part of the attention of why it didn't go forward is there was some opposition from people like myself and others who felt it's the wrong way of doing things.
One example.... You can say in your requirements something that makes intuitive sense: it has to go a certain speed; it has to go 273 knots an hour. But when you think about it, that doesn't make any sense, because what's important is not how fast it goes, but how long it takes to get wherever you have to go. There's a difference. If you locate your aircraft at different places within the country, you may not need to go as fast in order to get there within the requisite period of time.
And people here have talked about the importance of indicating things in performance terms. That means saying what the aircraft must do, not what it must be. It must be able to save lives within a period of time, as opposed to being able to necessarily be an aircraft that can fly so fast. It's getting the mindset changed to a performance base from a detailed spec base that is a key part of this solution.
I see I'm being waved by the chairman.