Mr. Speaker, I know the Conservatives are not very good at figures, given the way they ran up the deficit, and they seem to have a hard time recognizing that.
They equally have a very difficult time coming to grips with the helicopter purchase. They fail to understand that they were proposing helicopters at a time when we could not afford them. They were military development helicopters which meant that a lot more money was going to go into the development stage before they would fly.
We are buying off the shelf helicopters that are already commercially certified in search and rescue which do not have all of the costs associated with them which their proposal had. We have ended up buying helicopters, and subsequently the maritime helicopters, at 30% less than what they would have paid. That was a shame. The taxpayers could not afford that.
I am very pleased about the search and rescue helicopters that we are buying. Yes, they are a cousin of the helicopter that was in its developmental stage, but getting it off the shelf and commercially certified is a lot cheaper. This helicopter will meet our requirements, which was the most important aspect of this purchase. It went through a very rigorous test and an extensive examination to ensure that it was the helicopter to best meet our operational needs and to do it at a price that was affordable to the Canadian public.
Even more important is to note that buying it now as we have, we bought it at a time that we could afford it. We got rid of that big deficit which we inherited from the Conservative government.