Thank you.
We have a very close working relationship with the Canadian government. We're the prime contractor. We're proud to be the prime contractor for both the Arctic ships and the Canadian surface combatant. What we highlighted in our testimony was really to keep the CSC urgency out there, because we can undermine the stability of the shipbuilding program and bring back the boom and bust if we don't do that. The costs will spiral if we continue to delay that program. Then it's the speed of decision-making, as we just talked about, somebody who can say, “Okay, we're going that way.”
We've done a good job so far on CSC, but the tough work is ahead of us. The tough work is to decide, once we pick a ship, how much of it we'll change, in what areas and to what end, as was brought out about Canadian content. It's going to take speed, it's going to take somebody in charge, and it's going to take leadership, somebody who's credible enough within the government to be able to get that through the individual departments.
Last, we do think the current strategy for maintenance, particularly on the major combatants, the Halifax class, is undermining the shipbuilding strategy. In my last job in the U.S., one of my big responsibilities was to load the big shipyards that were building ships with plenty of maintenance to drive the cost of shipbuilding down and take that overhead. If you take the Halifax class out of Irving Shipbuilding and put it somewhere else, you will pay that other place's overhead and you will pay for the full cost of the overhead on the AOPS and then the CSC program. There are other reasons, but there's also the stability of the workforce.
Those are the areas. We'd say you should look at maintenance as a strategic enabler of shipbuilding. Keep CSC on the road, and let's have speed of decision-making by somebody who can make the hard decisions in a very timely manner.