Madam Speaker, I confess that it is very satisfying to see the history laid out and the conclusions reached by the Auditor General over his signature, but in fact there was very little that was surprising or new to those of us who have been following this issue closely.
One of the surprising things, and it goes to what the parliamentary secretary was talking about, the industrial benefits issue, was the finding that the government, in terms of its projections of industrial benefits arising out of this program, had been relying entirely on the prime contractors for the F-35, those contractors who had work provided to them under the program that had existed to date.
Those projections were regurgitated, reiterated by the government wholly in an unqualified and unchecked way. The Auditor General found that those projections were too often overly optimistic. So when the government members talk about how well managed that program was, they omit these very critical details about mismanagement of that part of the program. It seems, frankly, that the government's response to the Auditor General's report is simply another overly optimistic and frankly misleading approach to the F-35.