Mr. Speaker, right from the beginning this issue has been a massive waste of taxpayer money. I agree with the hon. member. I could look at some of the statistics I wish could have been included in the main part of my speech.
There are cancellation penalty costs of $478.6 million. Then the cost of actually upgrading the Sea Kings. Mechanics can only do so much but they have to go ahead and repair them. It is $50 million to upgrade them. Then there are maintenance costs. As I said, for every hour in the air it is 40 hours of maintenance. That is another $750 million. Then there is the cost of the replacement at $2.9 billion for 28 helicopters.
This means that the government is spending close to $5 billion. The original contract was for seven helicopters and would have cost only $3.24 billion. It is an absolute waste of money.