Yes, thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I must say, I find it refreshing to hear the honourable member talking about Canadian sovereignty. I wish you had the same faith in the aerospace industry as you had in other forms of sovereignty, because you said yourself, back in July of this year--I'm quoting you, Mr. Bachand--that Quebec companies are “all pleased about the project”, that they already have contracts with Lockheed Martin, and that “we say it’s important” that these maintenance contracts be given to those companies.
Well, some of those companies that are under the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada...and I'm quoting now from Mr. Claude Lajeunesse, whom I think you're familiar with. He says, “The Next Generation Fighter is the single largest military aircraft procurement program of the Government of Canada in the foreseeable future and will positively affect the Canadian aerospace industry for decades to come.”
And I can quote others in the same area. Mr. Richard Aboulafia, vice-president of analysis, Teal Group, in Quebec, described the JSF program as a game-changer that is estimated to capture more than half of the world fighter production by 2019.
Also Gilles Labbé, chair of Aéro Montréal, president of Héroux-Devtek, said: “This is a historic procurement for Canada and excellent news for the Quebec aerospace cluster and the entire Canadian aerospace industry.”
On your question, Mr. Bachand, about maintenance and sustainable costs, as you will know, we are still maintaining and sustaining the current fleet of CF-18s, so sustainable costs continue through the life of the aircraft. We'll receive that aircraft around the year 2016-17, and then on as we receive all 65 planes. So the cost of sustainment is anticipated to be in the same order of magnitude as the CF-18 fleet. That is to say--and I think it's quite remarkable when one considers that we will have had those planes for 30 years--the cost of maintaining them will be comparable, somewhere in the range of $250 million annually. When you project those dollars from 1980 dollars to 2010 and onward, it's the same range, same order of magnitude, and that's because we're in a global supply chain.
In fact, as more companies buy this aircraft, and because we're in the MOU, we will in fact see the potential for the cost of the aircraft to come down. Countries like Israel have joined on, and Japan and Singapore are similarly looking at buying this aircraft. If they do, the potential costs of ongoing sustainment, because we're in the global supply chain, could come down.