You know, there was no shipbuilding in Canada for many years. You had shipyards in Montreal and you had shipyards up in the Great Lakes. You had a number of them. They all went broke. Davie's has been broke I don't know how many times. It went bankrupt different times. You heard from Jonathan here that they were about ready to close down. We closed down one big modern shipyard, and we were about to close the one in Halifax because the government had no foresight in this business. It was going to let it go. It was letting it disappear.
We worked as an industry group, and we had no idea where it was going to end up. All we were saying to Ottawa was: “Listen, if you want ships and if we're going to protect our country and have an industry that supports the country and defends the country and so on, somebody better wake up.” We worked as a group, and in that period of time some people dropped out, some people were sold, and some people went bankrupt, because it took many years. I wrote many letters and made many trips to Ottawa to try to convince politicians to move, and we got no response, so the thing went into disarray.
In that time, we all bid. Davie's bid. Jonathan's company bid. Anybody could bid. I can tell you that when it came to the deadline, there were very tough requirements about bidding. At the last minute we were told, “There will be a two-week delay because Davie wants another two weeks to bid.” We said, “That's not fair. Those aren't the requirements.” We were told, “Forget about the requirements. That's what we're going to do.” I said, “Okay, let it go.”
I understand the problem for Davie. I'm sympathetic to it, but I'm also going to fight for our company. We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars. We've trained people. We've worked like hell to make something go. The problem in Canada is that we get political about everything, and then we end up with nothing, because we can't sustain a competitive business. We're going to have to do what we have to do to build ships in this country. We're going to have to look after industries in Quebec, and I'm all for that, but we can't be so political about everything that we get nothing that is efficient.
There will be lots of good things happening in Quebec because there always is, but don't feel that we're out there trying to say, “Kill the competition.” We've been beaten up like everybody else has been in this business, so we want to be reasonable. We're trying to support lots of local industries, and we're going to support local industries, but we have to be strategic about how we spend federal money.