National Defence committee  I will qualify that with one thing. Remember when I said our defence research spending has fallen to 1.2%? On the CPF, if was probably in the neighbourhood of 5% to 7%. All of those successful companies, I can almost be sure to 99%, were also matched by huge Canadian defence rese

National Defence committee  I can probably kick off. Yes, yes, yes. Upon reading the documentation for the Canadian surface combatant, because it's in the news, there is a sustained effort to make it contingent that anybody who bids had better plan on transferring a huge amount of work to Canada, be it wit

National Defence committee  I've had the privilege of reading a lot of the Canadian surface combatant documentation. When you read into it, you find that the designers say, yes, we'll bid your design and we'll incorporate it, but we insist on an incredibly high level of intellectual property transfer, so we

National Defence committee  I had contractor support for six of those MCDVs. While it's news to me that it's gone to hell, when I was there the support was superb. The company that we hired would fly its technicians all over the world to repair them. I will acknowledge Ken's point. Certainly based on the A

National Defence committee  You start, Ken, please.

National Defence committee  I'm a huge fan of the national shipbuilding procurement strategy and I've written on it. Right now, we have seven bidders who have a very strong probability of providing a ship that meets probably 95% of what Ken Hansen has just outlined. These are mature shipbuilding countries w

National Defence committee  That's an incredibly complex question requiring expertise beyond my skills. However, I have visited HDW, Howaldtswerke Deutsche Werft, a submarine builder next door to ThyssenKrupp, the other builder and exporter. It is incredibly proud to say its assembly line is lean, and it

National Defence committee  I had a three-level answer to that question in mind, all in rising cost. The first level is this committee. I left you a copy of my MA thesis on the role of the defence committee in 1994 in shaping defence policy. Most analysis will credit that as being the gold standard in defen

National Defence committee  That is but the tip of the iceberg of the problem. Our capital figures, which I have already outlined, are at a crisis level in the view of the experts. Our research and development funding about three years ago—and it's been downward ever since—was 1.4% of our total budget. The

National Defence committee  One qualifier I have—and I hope you'll be briefed on it, or ask to be briefed on it—is that Canada is basing a lot of the statement of requirements for its new ships on a superb modelling capability at the Maritime Warfare Centre in Halifax, where we do top-level work. It explain

National Defence committee  The grocery list, for me, is that we need two joint support ships in whatever guise is reasonable. We need two HADR ships, as long as they have significant refuelling capacity to spell the JSS, the joint support ship, when it's in refit. It becomes a far more useful vessel if it

National Defence committee  Oh, sorry, we haven't got to the MPAs. Don't forget, we're building 16 Coast Guard vessels. There are currently 46 large vessels in their fleet. They are old. We are satisfying less than half the demand of what the Coast Guard requires. We have 10 MPAs. We originally bought 18,

National Defence committee  The Houthi one is a great example. I think caution is needed here as the U.S. is still trying to put together the picture. What the Mason had to do to ensure they were defeated was fire. Medium-range cease barrel missiles, long-range standard missiles, and a spectacularly expen

National Defence committee  Yes.

National Defence committee  Canada in almost all areas has interoperability with the United States, which traditionally leads all coalitions. Anyway, it sets an extremely high bar because the Americans aren't going to cumber themselves with data links of a slow nature just because you couldn't afford a high