I've had the privilege of reading a lot of the Canadian surface combatant documentation. When you read into it, you find that the designers say, yes, we'll bid your design and we'll incorporate it, but we insist on an incredibly high level of intellectual property transfer, so we can do the maintenance. There's apparently been blood on the floor on this topic. You read about it in the press.
Throughout my reading, the intent has been that Canadian firms will be doing the maintenance and I'm sure there must be some small element that might not be. That certainly is the tenor of the documents and I applaud them for it.
Outsourcing of defence capability to commercial firms is happening all over the world. I applaud the navy. I think it's probably, of the three services, one of the last ones to insist on a large government workforce doing direct maintenance on ships but at the end of the day, it's a cost factor. For example, a ship now will have six different radars. Are you going to train six different technicians to be able to address each one because they're probably fundamentally different or are you going to say, I'll accept a commercial guy doing work on three of them. It's simply a factor of dollars and cents. If the navy had a choice, I'm sure it would want all of its work done in-house.
Ken, I think probably has some strong views here too.