Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise tonight to elaborate on my question about the issue of the new maritime helicopter procurement. At the time the defence minister replied to my question which had been directed to the public works minister, but the genesis of the whole issue is whether we are getting the best value for the new dollars we are going to spend.
After 10 years of foot dragging on this issue, the cancellation of the EH-101s which the previous government had ordered, we find the government is now in a hurry to be seen to be doing something but it has really given up the pretence that it is out to get helicopters as fast as possible. There have been 10 years of the government dragging its feet.
I am really concerned. Does the minister understand that the best price and lowest dollar is not necessarily the same as best value? We have to talk about the lifetime of the contract, the helicopters in place, maintenance of them and fleet commonality. A lot of those things come into best value when we start to describe it.
Best value is called for by the Auditor General, Treasury Board guidelines, the public works manual and of course the new finance minister in his 2003 budget. If the minister will not deny that bureaucrats are using lowest cost compliance to choose a contractor, then how can the minister explain the dumbing down of requirements for the potential new helicopter? I will run through the points where the government has weakened the bid.
Does the new chopper need twin landing gear? The old Sea King has it. Does it need to take off with a full load in zero wind conditions? The Sea King can. Does it need to fly more than two hours and twenty minutes? The Sea King, even at 40 years of age, can still do it. Does it need to carry more than one little torpedo if it is warm out? There is the load capacity. The Sea King can carry two now, formerly four. Does it need to cruise faster than 120 knots? The Sea King can still maintain and sustain 151 knots. Does it need to be able to handle new equipment in the years ahead? Apparently it is acceptable that its performance falls off.
What is listed as specs for the new helicopter does not even compete with the 40-year-old Sea Kings that we have today. The government has lowered the requirements to try to bring in a cheap price to justify the cancellation from 10 years ago. It is a terrible way to operate a procurement procedure.
Canadian taxpayers, and of course we in the opposition, would like an explanation why the government is looking for a helicopter that is slower, smaller, less safe and less capable than our 40-year-old Sea Kings.
A lot of it seemed to come to pass when the Prime Minister's Office made the cancellation. Now it seems to be muddling up the requirement process in the new procurement. It was debundled under the former public works minister who is now an ambassador. We hope he is doing a better job as an ambassador than he did as public works minister. He debundled it, split it apart. He took the airframe and got bids on that, and then got bids on the whole mission suite and the guts of the unit from someone else. Everybody said that was not the right way to go, that it was totally wrong-headed.
The government has rebundled it under the new ministers who are in place. That is a good idea but it seems to us to have more to do with the Sikorski-Bombardier partnership than it does with the common sense that is required in this type of procurement.
The bottom line is, who is holding it up? Why? Why are we flipping and flopping on this? Why is the government not talking about fleet commonality the same as it did with the Challengers?