I can.
We have a number of factors, some of which you point at, rightfully so, and that the Auditor General points at.
On historical costs, are they the best indication of future costs? The answer is no. At times when we're doing some of these things—and again, in a period without the “costers” we have today—the only data we have is historical costs. That's part of it. That's something that we've been working on and improving.
I'll just point out, though, for the $35 million to the $321 million, if I can call it the “contractual costs”, that part of it is lessons learned in that contract on how we're doing maintenance. For example, it's not an overall increase. It's what we've brought into the contract. It includes other maintenance that we were doing as heavy maintenance, through other contractual vehicles that we found to have the economies of scale, bringing it all into the Victoria in-service support contract. That accounts for some of the increase, which again is not a cost increase, but an increase in the use of that contract.
A lot of it is capital improvements. That is not maintenance. We do this. In particular, in a ship or a submarine, when you have it taken apart to do maintenance, if you're going to change sonars, periscopes, torpedoes, and communications, the time to do that work is while you're doing the maintenance. Again, capital projects are approved separately, and the contract becomes the vehicle by which we do the installation, so it's not entirely an increase in maintenance costs.
The other thing is that we relooked at the approach to maintenance. As it says here, again, we acquired the Victoria class submarines with very little time at sea and not a good understanding of what is an extremely complex platform, which has dire consequences if you have major system failure. At first, we looked at about a four-and-a-half-year cycle and then about a year and a half in heavy maintenance. What we've been able to do is bundle together a lot more of the heavy maintenance. Now we've evolved all the way to a nine-year cycle and then putting the boat into maintenance for three years.
Certainly, it is an indication of some of the things you're pointing at, sir, some of which is an underestimation of maintenance and that, but there are other factors at play here, which include bringing more maintenance into the contract from elsewhere, capital investments that are occurring in this, and the periodicity of the maintenance, which is to say that we're doing more in-depth and deeper maintenance less often, sir, but it's taking longer.