I'm going to shift gears a little bit here.
Your mandate letter talks about you working with the Minister of Public Services and Procurement to launch an open and transparent competition to replace the CF-18 fighter aircraft.
During the campaign, the Liberal platform said, quite bluntly, that we would not buy the F-35 stealth fighter-bomber. Now cabinet has set up a secret committee to look at procurement. To follow up on that, just a couple of weeks ago, I understand, National Defence put almost $33 million into the consortium to maintain our position there.
I'm wondering if you're having a change of heart on the F-35 and are seeing it as something our military wants. There are some comments out there, such as those by George Petrolekas of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, who said he didn’t think there would be a significant savings in acquisition and he suspected there probably wouldn’t be a significant savings in operating costs either that could be plowed into naval shipbuilding if we didn't get the F-35 and got something else.