Madam Speaker, I have a question for the government House leader. I have a document in my hand that tells me that the procurement of the Sea King helicopters goes back to 1978 when Prime Minister Trudeau was the Prime Minister of Canada. If we were to have started production today, we would have waited almost 30 years.
Could the minister provide a legitimate reason that the replacement of those Sea Kings helicopters has taken so long? Why did the government spend so much money cancelling the Sea Kings that obviously were part of the ongoing election campaign in 1993?
One of the points I want to make is the fact that the government spent $500 million to simply cancel the helicopter contract. In other words, it was half a billion dollars to simply cancel the contract with not one helicopter being built. How does the government leader justify that kind of expense?