Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in the late show and get a little more time to harangue the government. In this case we are going after the maritime helicopter replacement. It is very hard to get everything locked into a 30 second question, so four minutes seems like an eternity.
In the 10 year saga over which the helicopter replacement has dragged its heels in the political process here, we still have not even placed an order yet. We have not even nailed down what it is we are going to order. Ten years have gone by and these poor old Sea Kings are just getting older by the day.
There is a common thread we have seen through all of this procurement process over the past 10 years and that common thread is political interference. I know you find that hard to believe, Madam Speaker, but it is absolutely true. As more and more facts come to light, we see that it was politics that cancelled the order in the first place. It was politics that debundled the order. Alfonso Gagliano, who was the minister at that time, said in July 2000, “I just do what I am told, I am just a good little minister”. Who told him what to do? His political masters, of course.
The government has never really fully explained why the contract was debundled. It has never been done anywhere else in the world, not or in any industrialized country, for that matter. Nobody could find out why. Then the government clung to that stupid ideology for two and a half years. Now we have the Minister of Public Works and the Minister of National Defence both taking credit for rebundling it. Another two and a half years have squeaked by and we still do not have anything.
The Liberals throw around a lot of fancy titles like “statement of requirements”. That is what this late show is based on. The other day the Minister of National Defence said that the government had not changed the statement of requirements since 1999, that nothing had changed. I guess technically that is true. The statement of requirements has not changed, but what has changed is the requirement specifications that make that statement of requirements into a helicopter. That has been played with, up, down, sideways and all over the map.
I have done up a bit of a flow chart as to what the government started out with and what it has dumbed it down to at this particular point. There are things like the fact that there is no requirement now for structural crashworthiness. It used to be that 85% had to remain structurally integral. Now there is nothing. As well, there is no requirement now for a safe landing after a single engine failure. Originally operators had to be able to maintain a hover by losing an engine. When it is only a two engine helicopter, of course that can be difficult, especially if one is under load at the time. Now there is no backlash if an aircraft is lost because it cannot maintain a hover, so there goes the crew and several hundred million dollars worth of stuff. There is no backlash if operators dump out their full cargo and jettison everything to try to maintain and limp back to shore because they have lost an engine. It is huge.
There is no requirement now to maintain a fuel reserve once the helicopter is back to base. It used to be that it had to have 30 minutes of fuel on board for adverse conditions. That is gone. There is no requirement for a tactical air navigation system. That can always be bolted in later, but that is what gets the helicopter back to the safe base. It is not there anymore. The payload has been lightened by 500 pounds since 1999.
The big thing was mission reconfiguration. There was nothing in the original one that allowed for anything to happen at that end: an hour and the helicopter was on its way. Now there is no interoperability. The operators fly back to ship or shore and have three hours to reconfigure the helicopter to get out and rescue somebody. As hon. members well know, in a rescue minutes count and now operators will be allowed three hours to go back to shore, tear things apart and then fly back out again, and flight time is added to that.
That is how much this has changed, so when the Minister of National Defence stands in the House and says that nothing has changed since 1999, it is a bald-faced abuse of the truth.