Thank you very much.
Philippe Lagassé appeared as a witness a few weeks ago. He mentioned that there was a tendency to lowball procurement requests to push them through Treasury Board.
Then we end up with projections that are four times higher in some cases. We were given the example of warships, which started out at $26 billion and ended up costing $100 billion. Mr. Lagassé said that this approach was often used to obtain approvals. Then, either the contracts are divided up so that only a portion can be carried out, or they go underfunded.
I had asked Ms. Beck for her opinion on that. She told me that it was hard to assess defence spending from the start.
Do you agree with Ms. Beck, or is there really a chronic lowballing issue in defence requests?