The original requirement.
I do not want to belabour this, but the case in point was the EH-101. It was a good helicopter, but it was too good for what was needed at the time. It was designed for the cold war. By the time the selection process had come to an end, the cold war was over and the requirements had changed.
Where did we go from there? We had many discussions in the special joint committee on national defence, in which I was honoured to play a role, along with other colleagues of the House. There was some disagreement, but I thought the work of that committee was conducted very co-operatively. The report was hailed as a good report from the bottom up. In 10 months of study the committee consulted over 1,200 Canadians and every kind of group which was involved and interested in national defence, from the positive to the medium to the negative. We took into consideration all of their concerns.
One of the major areas we spent time on was the procurement of equipment. Major equipment groups, defence preparedness groups, Canadian defence associations and the military equipment requirement industry came and spoke with us. Our conclusion was not in support of the motion the opposition has put forth.
In the major discussion one of the things we focused on was that the procurement function was central to the operation of any military service. If we do not have equipment we cannot really have a decent force. This is especially so in the modern era where weapons systems are becoming more complex, more sophisticated and more expensive, not just because of the escalation in money but also because of the escalation in complexity and sophistication.
The design and the delivery schedules extend over 10 to 15 years. I used the example of the Canadian patrol frigate. I think the
first one was delivered in 1988 and we will be delivering those ships until 1996. That is an eight to ten year delivery schedule.
The factor that was considered in the special joint committee was the regrettable tendency for the Canadian forces to overspecify the requirements and generally to use every procurement opportunity as a chance to design and build the very best weapons system possible. Best was the enemy of good enough.
The second point we focused on was that there was a stringent set of oversight and accountability requirements imposed over the years and probably for good reason by the Treasury Board.
Together these factors produced a bureaucracy and a system for the management and control of federal procurement that has grown out of all proportion to the real needs of the Canadian forces, out of proportion to the size of the Canadian forces which over the last 10 years has been reduced both in size and in budget. I will mention some figures on that in a few moments.
Our recommendations were threefold. We believed that a significant reduction in the unnecessary superstructure was long overdue. The recommendation was made that first of all the government make a public commitment to purchasing military equipment off the shelf and that it avoid the complex, slow moving custom designed procurement and production processes that characterized too many capital projects in recent years, some examples of which I have given.
In this spirit the procurement policies of the department and the Canadian forces should show a bias toward the purchase of commercially available products whenever possible, be it Canadian or offshore.
The final recommendation, and we felt strongly about this, was that the deputy minister and chief of the defence staff working with the officials of other concerned departments should take immediate steps to modernize and streamline the procurement process. The parliamentary secretary for industry and the parliamentary secretary for public works will be commenting on that this afternoon.
The white paper stemmed from our special joint committee. In the white paper a considerable effort was devoted to looking at capital equipment. The opening thoughts were that we had to change security environment and we had to change fiscal circumstance. This demanded that national defence radically restructure its plans to purchase capital equipment.
To put it more succinctly, if we add up all the reductions, in the last decade national defence has had funding reduced by $21 billion which is a lot of money over a decade and 21,000 people in the regular force which is a lot of people. I have not counted civilians and I have not counted the reserve force.
We cannot give up that amount of funding for whatever reason and expect to do business as usual.