Mr. Chair, I am pleased to be here tonight to participate in this process. I would like to thank the minister for appearing here tonight and spending several hours answering questions from members of the House.
The expenditures of the Department of National Defence are really vast. It is the largest single expenditure that Parliament reviews at $13.6 billion. The supplementary estimates alone are just over $1 billion, which is actually a sum that is larger than most departments of government.
In April of last year, in response to a written question that I sent the minister, I was told that the mission had cost, so far, $1.4 billion in incremental costs. About six weeks later, the Minister of Foreign Affairs told me that the mission had cost $1.8 billion and that the future costs of the mission would be $1.25 billion. The Minister of Finance has told me that the rest of the mission will cost $1.8 billion.
Clearly, these numbers are going up, and these are the incremental costs, not the full costs to DND. This number subtracts salaries and does not speak to the cost to the whole of government, to the costs of supporting veterans and their families. If we add up the full costs, as published in the department's report on plans and priorities, we get a sum of over $4.1 billion.
Can the minister now give us an update on the full costs of the mission going forward to 2009?