It's not lost on me that today is World Maritime Day, and here were are talking about things that impact the maritime industry.
To your point about the shipyards, the only thing the lack of bids proves is that the process was stacked against domestic yards. It's time for our government to invest in our workers, because no yard in Canada is going to scale up if work keeps going overseas, and 65% of commercial shipbuilding is done in China. Unless we invest in the industry at home and we stop sending contracts overseas, we're not going to have an industry. To Marty's point, if we don't have an industry for shipbuilding, we're going to lose reasons to use our steel. If we lose our steel, we lose our domestic capacity and our sovereignty and independence in that field.
We need to provide a process that makes it so that future builds can put value on supporting local jobs, using local materials and continuing to reinforce local supply chains, because that's how we build a country that works. If we want to talk about large national projects, I can't think of a larger national project in a country with a massive coastline than shipbuilding.