Government Operations committee  Again, having been in the business for several decades and having successfully delivered many projects, I will say that every day we work in this business.... There are hundreds, thousands of projects nobody hears about that are delivered successfully. What I was trying to say i

Government Operations committee  We are in conversations with Seaspan on a weekly basis. Again, we want to go back to the umbrella agreement that we have signed with Seaspan, which does include the Diefenbaker, or the polar icebreaker, as we call it. It is part of a program of work that the Coast Guard is planni

Government Operations committee  No. Again, we have a signed agreement. I just want to go back to the cost, if I may.

Government Operations committee  There's one issue of costing, the precision of costing, but there's also another issue, the issue of affordability, which we constantly have. Those are two things. First of all, you have to have the discipline, the mechanisms and the processes to come to the appropriate costing,

Government Operations committee  Every time a decision like this is made, there is a business case that is done by the navy and the Department of National Defence, if it's about navy capability, or by the Coast Guard. What goes into these business cases is obviously the costs that are available on the open marke

Government Operations committee  This would have to be asked of the Coast Guard. Again, those are some of the decisions that are made for these kinds of capabilities.

Government Operations committee  As I said earlier, we have selected a preferred bidder as part of the consultation process—

Government Operations committee  Fundamentally, the requirements of the navy were established, and the procurement process was built on meeting those requirements. I think it's fair to say that any warship or Canadian surface combatant we select will require some sort of work done to it. There was—

Government Operations committee  There was a threshold established for the level of maturity the design would have to have to be deemed acceptable, and that was established early on, as you said, in 2016.

Government Operations committee  Again, this is procurement that's still in process. We have not landed yet on the final decision. We are in negotiations with our preferred bidders. I need to make a caveat before I talk further about it.

Government Operations committee  The costing was re-baselined as part of “Strong, Secure, Engaged” last year.

Government Operations committee  The frigates budget was re-baselined as part of “Strong, Secure, Engaged” last year, when the government announced the acquisition of 15 surface combatants. There has been some work done as part of that costing to take into account the uncertainty of which design would be selecte

Government Operations committee  The costing that was done by National Defence in preparation for “Strong, Secure, Engaged” does account for uncertainty, not knowing yet which design is to be selected, and also the fact that some of these designs, even independent—

Government Operations committee  All right. I'll stop here; otherwise my microphone will be disconnected.

Government Operations committee  Let me go back again to where we are at with the solicitation process for the Canadian surface combatant. As I said, in October we did announce the preferred bidder, which triggered what we call the conditions precedent phase. We are negotiating with the preferred bidder on intel