I'm a huge fan of the national shipbuilding procurement strategy and I've written on it. Right now, we have seven bidders who have a very strong probability of providing a ship that meets probably 95% of what Ken Hansen has just outlined. These are mature shipbuilding countries with mature navies who don't build crap. We wouldn't let them bid anyway if they did.
I must applaud the current Minister of Public Services and Procurement, who didn't get cornered on the issue of how much money is she going to spend. We all know they budgeted $26 billion 10 years ago. We all know that every day inflation is stripping $1 million out of that project. She has correctly said, “we are going to wait until this project completes project definition”. That's approximately two years from now before we commit to a bill. That is critically important because three arrows will meet in about two years. Do you want 15 ships? Do you want 10 ships that are absolutely super-capable? Do you want 10 ships that have exceedingly high Canadian content?
Don't forget, we said we want military off-the-shelf designs. Very few people build anything with significantly high Canadian content, even though there are at least four firms with superb capabilities, that are selling literally hundreds of them overseas. The issue is what is it going to cost to change your French, Germany, British, Italian, or Spanish design to insert exceedingly high-grade Canadian content into it.
You will have competing ideas. In two years, there will be a huge debate. How much are you willing to spend and do you want more ships, more high-capability ships, or ships with the optimum benefit for Canadian high-tech industry?