Madam Speaker, I have two comments and a question for the parliamentary secretary.
I do not know whether this is a military tactic, but he digressed somewhat from the topic at hand-I am actually very glad he did so-to discuss timeframes and the whole structure at headquarters for supervision, programming auditing, and so forth, all of which takes forever. He said as long as 15 years, in some cases.
This is indeed one of the problems of defence procurement. The Auditor General mentioned this in his 1993 report, and he made his case very eloquently. We also discussed this on the special joint committee, but I would like to ask the parliamentary secretary what exactly has been done within this whole review process.
There was, for instance, the software for maintenance of the frigates, for which the military had set certain criteria. After a lot of negotiations and unavoidable delay, we finally obtained a small percentage what the military had asked for. After spending about $30 million on this software, we have yet to obtain what we want.
I wonder how the parliamentary secretary can say that things have changed within the Department of National Defence. If we are going to buy equipment directly on site, will defence testing requirements become stricter or will they remain the same after acquisition of this equipment?
We have now reduced the EH-101 capability to 15 per cent. Are we going to upgrade it again afterwards? Because nothing has happened to change the whole situation he referred to in the department and at headquarters in the past two years. That is my first comment. I would like to know whether the parliamentary secretary has any specifics.
Second, in his speech he said that we could no longer afford to use defence procurement as a tool for regional development, as the federal government often did in the past. As I said earlier-and I appreciate the fact that the parliamentary secretary talked about being logical-when there is no infrastructure, I agree we should not create a new infrastructure, but when it exists, when a company has the infrastructure, then we can use and adapt it to defence criteria.
When we talk about armoured personnel carriers, I am always reminded of the fact that the last deliveries of Bisons, which are now judged to be obsolete or old, were made in 1994. If defence equipment is old after only one year, I really wonder about the future of the Canadian army's equipment.