Thank you, Chair.
Procurement is a funny thing. The public always gets told that the lowest bid on a ship is going to be the best thing ever, and then, of course, everybody knows the price is going to go through the roof.
We have the Canadian surface combatants project, which was originally tagged at $60 billion and is now coming in at $84 billion. Who knows where it ends up? For me as a legislator, that extra $24 billion would hire a lot of nurses, fix a lot of my roads and make sure that some of my northern indigenous communities aren't living in third-world conditions.
Professor Taylor, you talk about spiral acquisition. Is this just part of the game of procurement or is there a way we can actually put the real cost in, so that we know what we're dealing with when we go back to our citizens and tell them why they're buying these very expensive projects?