National Defence committee  Thank you.

National Defence committee  Apart from the NSS, which ran a competition where two shipyards were selected, the Vancouver Shipyards and the Irving shipyards in Halifax, there are other vessels, tugs, and other assorted ships that will have gone out to open tender and are available for other shipyards to buil

National Defence committee  The export permits are issued out of Global Affairs Canada in line with the export control regime. We've made a number of suggestions on how to streamline the process. In particular, one of the things that concerns us most is the harmonization among all the various export control

National Defence committee  Part of bidding in a timely fashion is that you will have paved the way to be able to bid in a timely fashion. In other countries, the defence industry for export is a managed market. It's not a free-trading market. If you want to have an entrance point on a major procurement in

National Defence committee  Right. I guess it depends how you want to attach to the nomenclature. The design is a modified existing design. The subtlety is that this doesn't mean it is off the shelf 100%. We all know that there will be a Canadianization of the platform that goes on. We all would hope that w

National Defence committee  An interesting thing has been done in this project, in that there is what we call a value proposition that's put in place in the RFP. The principle of that value proposition is the incorporation of “Canadian work-share” into that base design. All the bidders are required to ident

National Defence committee  This is the highest value proposition we've seen to date, and the most detailed. Coming out of the gate, we're in a very good position to maximize Canadian content. That being said, you only are going to see it at execution, right? What we've asked all parliamentarians to do is k

National Defence committee  I can't speak for the yards. I cannot speak to the capacity that the yards are able to handle. I can certainly say that never in 20 years I have seen Canadian industry—or any industry, for that matter—not find a way to staff up when you dangle out contracts and say that you nee

National Defence committee  In particular, in terms of warships, almost every country has unique requirements in terms of their warships. It's very uncommon to take a warship and sell it to another nation off the shelf. In fact, I don't know if it's ever actually been done. It's just not done. The sensor su

National Defence committee  It's impressive.

National Defence committee  I can't tell you whether they're going to have a capability gap. It has to be National Defence that looks at that. What I can tell you, though, is that NSS was designed on the premise that we're trying to avoid a capability gap. The premise of having an industrial strategy in gen

National Defence committee  I'm sorry, but there's a problem with the simultaneous interpretation.

National Defence committee  Could you please repeat the question? I can only hear the French, not the interpretation.

National Defence committee  It's okay; it's fixed.

National Defence committee  To answer your first question about whether there has been a change in the national shipbuilding strategy, I don't think so. Philosophically, no. It is in what you'd call the throes of doing the thing. Inevitably, when you build such complex vessels over such a long period of t