Yes, and to some degree I'm playing the devil's advocate, because I think the question needs to be asked: should we have a submarine program? I think we either have a modern, highly capable submarine program or we stop this charade we have right now of pouring money into a hole and getting vessels that are not 21st century. This is the thing; we are just stringing out old vessels, pretending to have a submarine capability.
This new government spent another $900 million on Babcock International to keep refitting and repairing these old submarines. For the same amount of money that has been spent over the course of the last decade, we could have three or four brand new German-made submarines with under-ice capability. We missed that opportunity by stringing along these old Victoria class vessels. That's my point.
I'm trying to challenge the groupthink that exists in the Royal Canadian Navy. Okay, you want submarines? So make a justification for having new submarines. Don't pretend.
I'm not an expert on the future of maritime warfare or the geopolitics of Asia. There are others who are better able to speak to the issue as to why we need new submarines, but we clearly don't need old submarines.
I have one last thing, very quickly, on the issue of icebreakers. If we put a deck gun on the front of our Coast Guard vessels, then we could justify calling them part of defence procurement, and we would take a serious burden off the Royal Canadian Navy with respect to the Arctic and coastal defence. We just bought a whole bunch of new Hero class midshore patrol vessels for the Coast Guard. They're fast, but they're not armed. The previous government considered very seriously putting guns on them. You get into issues as to what kind of personnel you need on board a Coast Guard vessel to actually operate the gun. But if you want to do that, yes; you solve a lot of problems. You don't need to envelop the Coast Guard within the Royal Canadian Navy, but you can change the operations a little bit and immediately boost our capacity.
In regard to a deck gun on the front deck of each of our icebreakers, again, what are you going to do if you get into a situation where there are smugglers who are armed—call out the Royal Canadian Navy, and they have an AOPS that's five days' sailing away?