Thank you, Deputy and Mr. Chair.
I would like to clarify that of the four phases of a project—identification, options analysis, where you identify your high-level requirements, do your preliminary estimates and seek approval in principle to begin a project, and then the definition work, where you've refined those detailed costs and plans for infrastructure and weapons and logistics set-up, etc.—we're still in the options analysis stage. We have not received Treasury Board approval to begin funded definition, in which you do the detailed, refined, uniquely Canadian costing work.
But to answer the question specifically, annually the joint strike fighter program office in Washington provides cost estimates to the partners on two things: the unit flyaway cost—the cost of an actual joint strike fighter, by the years in which those aircraft were produced—and as well, their estimates of what in-service support and sustainment would cost.
We receive those estimates every spring, and we go down to the joint project office, sit down, and have a very detailed formal dialogue with them, to have a detailed understanding of the acquisition piece and the sustainment piece, to which we add anything that would be unique to our fleet of aircraft—our choice of how many simulators, our logistics set-up, etc. That process happens annually and is normally completed by the summer of each year.