National Defence committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman and committee members, for having us here today. I joined Irving Shipbuilding in 2013 after a long career in the shipbuilding industry, including 36 years in the U.S. Navy. I was honoured to be appointed president of Irving Shipbuilding at a time when th

National Defence committee  I will just chime in too. First and foremost, this procurement is about getting Canada's navy the equipment that it needs. From the start, this is a requirements-driven process. We went through an exhaustive effort over almost a year to look at every single requirement on a shi

National Defence committee  Thank you for that question. First let me say that every year, the U.S. Navy continuously builds, on average, 13 to 15 major capital warships, so it's not a matter of.... As our colleague Jonathan from Seaspan indicated, we're both standing up shipyards from scratch, so we're on

National Defence committee  Today we do not. I'm not telling a story out of school; we've made this comment to the government. It's very much a distributed process in which we will sit across the table from Industry Canada, Department of National Defence, the navy, PSPC, and the Department of Justice and ne

National Defence committee  I would say one of the things we're going to have to manage well, both the government and industry collectively, is our appetite for change. If you start to change too much on a ship, if you start to change 10% or 15% of the ship, you're starting to change 75% to 80% of the drawi

National Defence committee  Thank you. We have a very close working relationship with the Canadian government. We're the prime contractor. We're proud to be the prime contractor for both the Arctic ships and the Canadian surface combatant. What we highlighted in our testimony was really to keep the CSC urg

National Defence committee  Thank you for the question. About half the cost of the ship will be associated with the mission systems. The combat systems and the communication systems are about half the cost of the ship. It'll go plus or minus 10%, but it's somewhere in that range. I'll also say that a good

National Defence committee  I can tell you that the higher inflation area—I used to look at these areas in my previous role—is the combat systems area. It really goes to signal processing, the computer system and all the advances in weapons, with weapons seekers and the integration of all of it. I will te

National Defence committee  I would say that certainly for every job in the shipyard—we think we'll be at about 2,500 people in the shipyard—there will be an equal number of contractors and other support folks, mostly supporting the combat systems piece. The combat systems piece is where we anticipate the C

National Defence committee  The RFP, the request for procurement, as it is currently structured, gives Canada the ownership and the rights to the intellectual property.

National Defence committee  Yes, the Government of Canada.

National Defence committee  That is the right structure. This is going to be Canada's main naval battery for 50 years. It will be modified several times, and Canada needs to own that IP.

National Defence committee  Does that eliminate competition? I think all of us up here would say that Canada has already held the competition, and the shipyards that are sitting up here have won that competition. The decision was made to invest heavily for the long term in these modern shipyards, and now th

National Defence committee  Let me first say that it's not the shipyard's job to determine the laydown of naval forces. We have done analysis of a 15-ship Canadian surface combatant fleet with maintenance cycles and a traditional and historic deployment profile for the taskings that Canada's navy is asked t

National Defence committee  Thanks for the question. We've built the most modern shipyard in North America. We have the single biggest building for shipbuilding in all of North America. We went around the world. We looked in the U.S. We looked in Europe. We even had the Koreans come and benchmark against