Mr. Speaker, it will be no great surprise to my colleagues that this is a follow-up question to the Prime Minister's response to a question I put in question period about the F-35.
This program literally has its wheels falling off. The gist of the question was why the Prime Minister ran an election in 2011 when he knew full well what the costs of the F-35 program would be, when he knew that the numbers that were presented to the cabinet were very similar to what the PBO had arrived at and what the Auditor General subsequently arrived at.
The Prime Minister blew me off and gave his standard answer, “I disagree with the premise of the question”, but the fact remains that Canadians were told in the 2011 election that the F-35 would be in the order of about $15 billion, knowing full well that it would be between $25 billion and $30 billion.
I do not know, Mr. Speaker, if you had the opportunity this weekend to see the Fifth Estate program, which was an hour long and was an exposé of all of the problems with this file. There are three areas of potential problems. There is the costing, with which we have been led on a merry chase. There is the requirements of our replacement fighter for the F-18. Then there are the industrial benefits. I will leave the industrial benefits aside for the time being because we can only cover so many problems in a four minute period.
On the actual statement of requirements, there was a startling revelation in the Fifth Estate program, which was also in the W-5 program, which said that in 2006, when the statement of requirements was presented to the minister of the day, there were some serious and consequential significant information missing, particularly with respect to the other competition. The statement of requirements was clearly weighted toward the F-35 and away from the others, in part because none of that material actually came to the fore.
It was kind of curious and interesting to listen to experts actually talk about this program. One particular expert, who was a principal designer of the F-16, said that this plane was a turkey. He said, very simply, that it had a limited range, it carried a payload and it was unable to manoeuvre in any kind of a dogfight.
In consequence, we have sold ourselves out to Stealth, and nobody has actually answered the question as to why Canada needs Stealth. I can see possibly why the Americans need Stealth or even the British, but why does Canada need Stealth? What we have married ourselves to at this point is an airplane that is slow, has limited range, limited payload and a whole bunch of nations have said that they should take a look at this again.
We in the Liberal Party have been saying forever that we need an open, fair and transparent competition.