Mr. Speaker, the experience for the commercial pilots of the Bell model 412 helicopter is different than the experience that our pilots have.
The federal government has in the past been warned about the problems of taking an untested, off the shelf commercial helicopter and using it in ways that it was not tested to operate.
In the 1998 report of the Auditor General into the purchase of major capital equipment for Canada's military, the Auditor General was particularly critical of projects that were fast tracked or sole sourced, such as the Griffon helicopter. He observed that when the procurement process was fast tracked or sole sourced important tasks and evaluation steps were often not completed and problems were only discovered after a particular piece of equipment had been put into service.
This problem was made worse by the cancellation of the EH-101 search and rescue helicopter. If only the government would have acted on the recommendations of the Auditor General then.