My colleague here is asking me whether I want to repeat a black box story that I shared last night as an example of a response to your question. I'm not sure it's the right one, but I'll do it very briefly.
It goes back to Mr. Hawn's earlier remarks that we have had an IRB policy for a long time. The company I worked for was a beneficiary of that some years ago in a major defence procurement that resulted in a black box in which European governments invested tens of million of dollars being put in Canadian industry as part of the offset requirements for that particular program. It didn't sound very sexy to begin with. It was a built-to-print job, which is a parlance we use in industry, as opposed to an engineering-intensive job. But very quickly, because products become obsolete, what happened was that here in the Ottawa Valley we had some very smart engineers who redesigned that black box, drove out costs, improved performance, and today every one in the world is produced 30 miles west of here. It was an example of where the policy worked. We created a world-class capability, and the most important thing is we moved from a manufacturing role to a very significant design and engineering role, so we owned the market going forward. That's an example.
If we were looking at programs before us now, the one that crosses my mind is the armoured vehicle programs. There were decisions made twenty years ago that we were going to be a world-beater in land vehicles, and we actually did it, as a small country, with a company called General Dynamics Land Systems, in London, Ontario, which, no question, is a world leader.
Very difficult procurement strategy decisions lie in front of us. Do we go to the international market and compete at the design level and build in Canada? That's one option. The second option is, do we do that and say that you will build it with our national instrument, an industrial centre of excellence, which is GDLS, or do we go to full and open competition, winner take all, which could mean we lose that ability in Canada? These are the types of tough decisions the government has, and I don't think there's a magic bullet. We have to look at each one of them on its merits and see how we get the best capability for the brave men and women in the forces and the best economic return.
It takes some pretty smart, dedicated, and frankly gutsy people to make those decisions at the end of the day.