Now, there is no hard-core study on this. The Parliamentary Budget Office had some numbers concerning the ships. Historian Granatstein had some estimates; I don't know how he obtained them.
As for the way we work in terms of economic benefits, and this is a very advanced economy, our policy seems to be to buy domestic whenever domestic is available. It can be available, but it may be very costly. The Australians completely gave up this policy.
This is a luxury for us because we don't have immediate threats, so we may be relaxed about it, but the Australians have no room to manouevre. They buy for their defence something worth a hundred bucks by paying a hundred bucks. We are paying $120 because we want to have some things produced here, however much more they may cost.
Our economic benefits program is designed for domestic consumption rather than defence, for domestic constituencies, so it's absolutely inefficient. Regardless of the governments for the past 35 years, this has come down from all governments since the 1980s and maybe the late 1970s. There is no political undertone to this.
To remain within my time, I will show you here these comparable countries in terms of development, as well as our industrial structures. Sizes differ, but the similarities arise because we are all in NATO—Australia, sort of. We are small and developed and we have narrow ranges of defence industries.
There is one mistake on page 7 that I have to draw to your attention. In the second row in the table, in the far right column called “JSF”, you have to put a question mark. We are in the reset process. As for what they do, I'm talking about economic benefits, and we are using so-called offsets, the Canadian expression being “industrial and regional benefits”. Australia said no. The Dutch are moving away. The Norwegians have to move away because the whole European Union is moving away from these offsets.
Offsets mean that when the defence contractors sell us something, we impose a certain value, which at the moment is 100%, that they have to invest here, but then we are in a sense forcing them to do things. There are a lot of escape mechanisms. It creates a lot of inefficiencies. For example, there are the so-called multipliers. Let's say they have to invest $10. If they come and give me a dollar at Queen's, it counts as $5, so immediately we're not enforcing anything.
Shown here is what we do in the world. As you can see, Australia is on the very liberal end of it in the sense that they say to the Australian firms that if they do it as well as anybody else, they'll get the contract. In our case, we say that there is a firm doing it and at whatever the cost it will be done here. That summarizes the policy. We stand where you see the red arrow there. That's my fault. I—