Thank you.
A couple of years ago, when Defence was looking at this property, it decided that, and I have a quote here, “it wouldn't look good to spend millions on a new headquarters rather than on the troops”. So they made a political decision. Now if they had unlimited budgets, perhaps they would have decided to do both, spend the money on troops as well as on this new headquarters. But they made a decision a couple of years ago that it wouldn't look good, so they made a political decision, and they seemed to be fine in the facilities they continued to have.
At the time--it's not that long ago--you said this is a unique facility. It didn't appear that any other department had the need for this very unique facility. Let's assume that they had actually taken that space. What would the RCMP be doing today? The space wouldn't have been available. We have this amazing coming together of circumstances, a unique facility and a unique need that find each other, and unsolicited proposals by Minto came into the department. At the same time we read that the member of Parliament for Nepean--Carleton, Pierre Poilievre, has been lobbying very hard for this to take place.
So how is it that recently the need wasn't there? The RCMP wasn't interested when Defence decided politically it would not be a good thing to do, yet things have changed and there's a political decision now to, within a couple of days perhaps, sign off on this?.