National Defence committee  Right now, the intention is to follow the Canadian shipbuilding policy. There was some discussion at some point about capabilities, again, which was to make sure that as we did the option analysis, we considered it all. We landed on building the next generation of tugs, and per the policy, we're pursuing a build-in-Canada approach.

National Defence committee  I would just add, again, joint support ship is the name of the project. They are much broader but, as the deputy said, principally they are warships. They are designed, have survivability, different things to do and they are ships we're bringing into service for at least 30 years.

National Defence committee  Thank you, sir, as always for the question. As you know, there are a number of pillars in the strategy, including smaller vessels and maintenance. As laid out, it's still the intention that smaller vessels for both the Coast Guard and the navy.... A big one for us on the horizon is a project we call the naval large tugs that will go out competitively.

National Defence committee  Thank you, sir. There were no design changes made in the RFPs, so our requirements have remained unchanged. After the first round of evaluations, we got some really good feedback on how to improve and streamline, so the changes we made were all about how to streamline the evaluation.

National Defence committee  Thank you for the question. Yes, in fact, we're very familiar with the fleet maintenance facilities and have a lot of discussions with them. What we're trying to do with the fleet maintenance facilities and other places is to make sure that they are focused on our most capable assets, meaning our submarines and frigates, and therefore, take the less complex things....

National Defence committee  I want to address the comment that the submarines are outdated. In reality, they have strong capacities and they regularly demonstrate, during operations, what they can accomplish. We've had many issues with maintenance and spare parts. That's a fact. However, we're addressing the situation.

National Defence committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Paul-Hus. It was to respond to the questions and comments from those who were going to submit bids. The changes reflected the answers to the questions we received.

Public Accounts committee  Quickly, regarding the fifth, how we operate the C-17s is what's called three lines of tasking, so that at any given time we have three aircraft available for missions. As these aircraft start to age, the amount of time they have to be in maintenance increases, and there are larger maintenance activities.

Public Accounts committee  Well, there are big periods of time...In fact, we're approaching the point now where we have more aircraft going into heavy maintenance, so we will only have three at Trenton. The maintainers have the spares, have the ability to do it when they have three, so actually, creating the capacity for four, when pretty much on a go-forward basis there will only be three airplanes there, would equally be a problem, because, again, we'd be paying for too many maintainers for not enough aircraft if we did that.

Public Accounts committee  We have set it up, but we still have work to do. I'll give you a few examples. As we operationalize all of this, it has to go out to all the bases, all the wings, all the deployed locations. When it comes to troops on the front line or ships at sea, which may go through periods without connectivity, you can imagine how much work we're giving them to do.

Public Accounts committee  That is correct.

Public Accounts committee  They fall under the government contracting regulations. There are, generally, four criteria under which we could choose to sole-source. For all of our large contracts, we, of course, do that through Public Services and Procurement Canada and, in many cases, Treasury Board. However, there is actually a policy with four criteria.

Public Accounts committee  The contract is under $25,000, there is only one source of supply, not in the national interest, or there is an emergency. There are also, in the context—and this falls under the government contracting regulations at Treasury Board—some caveats that were introduced by the previous government that allow us to step outside of the government contracting regulations...notably, urgent operational requirements.

Public Accounts committee  In separating out I think the two key points the Auditor General made, the importance of life-cycle costing and the good planning assumptions, if you look at the main fleets we're talking about here, all were acquired and looked at in service support contract during the height of our mission in Afghanistan.

Public Accounts committee  There certainly are examples where we've absolutely done that. That's where, as we renegotiated C-130Js and moved to the others, the new contracts and the new fleets we're bringing into place now follow much more the sustainment initiative—and you asked about lessons learned—that make sure we adopt that lesson.