Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Through you, to the witnesses, very much for being here today.
As Mr. Strahl said, I'm one of the mere citizens around the table and to boot, one without any financial background. I'm going to take advantage of restrictions on the chair to censor my questions and ask a few different questions.
With all due respect to the supplementary estimates (B), what struck me as a new MP in the House is not the millions we're talking about in those supplements but in fact the billions that get bandied about in discussions of defence matters. To give you some of the examples that have popping up on my BlackBerry in the last couple of weeks, there's been a military satellite that costs about half a billion dollars, which the associate minister of defence said in the House could be accommodated under current budgets. There's been a re-issuing of an RFP for military trucks, about 1,500 of them, a contract estimated at about $800 million. There have been further delays to the Cyclone helicopter. I see that as of last year, the Auditor General suggested that the cost of that procurement went up by over half a billion dollars. Of course, there are the F-35s. I guess it's possible that the associate minister and the minister have the estimates right on that one. But it's against all odds in just about every other estimate that I've seen in the world.
Can you take me through those examples and let me know how these kinds of billion dollar issues get accommodated within the budgetary process?