Mr. Speaker, it begs this question. Why would the Conservatives carry on an entire election on one set of costs and now, after the election, they have decided to incorporate a secretariat, which is to go around and find out what the costs are? Either they knew the costs before or they knew the costs after. My guess is they knew the costs before, but they did not tell us. Now they are trying to discredit the AG., so the KPMG folks have been hired to essentially discredit the Auditor General's report on full life cycle costs to the tune of $600,000.
What is interesting in this entire exercise, and I asked this question today, is why the Minister of Public Works and Government Services and Minister for Status of Women is acting minister of defence for the purposes of procurement.
Apparently the Minister of National Defence and, indeed, his associate minister are not capable of actually asking the relevant questions that are necessary to be asked in order to establish the costs. One would think, at this stage, six years after the fact, we could have actually arrived at the costs.
This plane has a minimum payload and a maximum payroll and the consequence is the taxpayer is getting hosed.