Government Operations committee  At the end of 2017 or the beginning of 2018, we will start building the first vessel.

Government Operations committee  Three years.

Government Operations committee  Thank you very much for the question. Through a number of projects, what we were finding—and a bit of perception, a bit of reality here about the nature of some of the military requirements as they were stated and whether they were specifying a specific product, whether they we

Government Operations committee  Coming back to your original question, the nature of a task-based contract means that it's not a contract for $40 million of work. It's a ceiling. Every bit of work that's done in there is negotiated on a task-by-task basis and it's the crown saying they want us to do this work.

Government Operations committee  What this allows us to do, because of the horizontal nature, because we're not in contract to build a joint support ship yet as they learn lessons on the offshore fisheries science vessel about certain design components, we can task them right away to look at the joint support sh

Government Operations committee  Thank you very much. Very specifically, as indicated, these would be estimates for purchases that are very much in the future. If you look at most of our projects, the Arctic offshore patrol ship that's in build, the joint support ship, and the interim AOR work being done in Dav

Government Operations committee  Again, perhaps, but it really becomes an issue of what we're trying to do which is really to wait until we have a degree of information that is reflective of what it is we're actually doing and acquiring. If you look at Canadian surface combatants, we have a prime contractor, th

Government Operations committee  Yes. It's not additional money. We're advancing work, so rather than wait—

Government Operations committee  It's not a progress payment.

Government Operations committee  Very quickly, if I could, then, it's not infrastructure. It's actually not progress payments. It's actually advancing specific work on the projects horizontally to benefit all the projects. It's work that would otherwise be done in an inefficient way in each project. We created t

Government Operations committee  I believe the contract is for $40 million. It is, again, work that otherwise would have been done later or probably at greater cost, so it's actually advancing work in each of those projects. It's done earlier, so it is not in addition to any of the work that would have been done

Government Operations committee  Thank you very much for the question. The strategy is still unfolding, and it was consulted internationally. I'm not sure of the origin of the paper you're describing, but we certainly engaged with our international allies, and we do that on a continuous basis. It had a number

Government Operations committee  Thank you very much for the question. Perhaps I can give you the perspective as viewed from the projects. The point of the strategy was to move away from a stovepipe project by project—

Government Operations committee  Yes.

Government Operations committee  For capacity, not for infrastructure. It's for capacity, so—