Mr. Chair, the Minister of National Defence has indeed not contradicted what I said. I jotted down his comments. He said that the $1.3 billion is not all about building ships. I did not say it was all about that. I said the lion's share of that is going to an up to 10 year program in terms of upgrading on our frigates and other ships. He said a considerable amount is going to Afghanistan. Any amount is considerable: $10 million, $50 million or $100 million is considerable.
The third area I want to draw out that gives me some concern is that his junior minister said the figure was $1.8 billion. The minister just corrected him and said no, it was $1.3 billion. I know that the Liberals have a hard time differentiating large sums of money, but that discrepancy is half a billion dollars.
Here we have the junior would-be minister and the minister. I appreciate the minister's honesty. In my dealings with him, I have found him to be honest. He has just corrected his junior minister to the tune of half a billion dollars. If they are that far apart and they are supposed to be the two who are closest together in terms of working on defence issues, how much are we missing and what discrepancies do we have in other areas? When we raise these figures we are not getting satisfactory answers when these two ministers can have a discrepancy between the two of them of half a billion dollars.