Madam Speaker, I would say to my colleague that the $44 million in question are simply listed under the Department of Foreign Affairs.
There is no doubt that approval happens there, and then Industry Canada proceeds with procurement, just like with Nuctech. That company caused a problem that we sorted through at the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates. The Department of Foreign Affairs needed equipment for its embassies. The contract was signed by Public Services and Procurement Canada, but there was a communication problem. It cost us $250,000 to get Deloitte to try to understand what went wrong. This is an example of the complexity of the machine whose components do not always talk to one another.
As for the point raised by the parliamentary secretary related to former prime minister Harper, I would remind him what I said in my speech, which is that the current Minister of Foreign Affairs clearly said that the China of 2020 is not the China of 2015. He was referring to the early days of the Liberal government and we are not even talking about the Harper years.
What we are saying is that there has been a radical change in Chinese policies in the past five years. It has become more aggressive in terms of expansion and taking control. There is no use talking about the Harper years. We are talking about the past five years. It is not necessarily Canada's fault. China is the one that has decided to do things differently in the world. As for us, we also have a decision to make on how we want to react to this.