Government Operations committee  That's right.

Government Operations committee  Do you want me to take this?

Government Operations committee  First of all, I would like to say....

Government Operations committee  To answer your first question, I would have to say that we're constantly in conversation with our allies who are in shipbuilding. We are aware of what our allies are doing with the construction of large icebreakers. We are not actively talking to them about options yet. The annou

Government Operations committee  We awarded the design contract in February to Irving Shipbuilding, who in turn awarded the subcontract to Lockheed Martin Canada who is working with BAE Systems.

Government Operations committee  What I can tell you is that we've just finished the competitive process to select the design. National Defence has a budget of $56 to $60 billion. The result of the competitive process confirms that at this point, there is still [Technical difficulty--Editor] in the budget to del

Government Operations committee  On the results of the competitive process, which meets the requirements of the navy, yes.

Government Operations committee  We saw two opportunities there to mitigate the cost risks associated with this decision—not necessarily added costs, but the mitigation of cost risks. One of them is to bring the efficiency of JSS 1 into JSS 2 by giving the engineers enough time to do the design changes and to in

Government Operations committee  Also, I would like to add that the costs associated with the delay to the surface combatants are also quite significant. There has been an investment of cash for those decisions, but there's also a significant cost avoidance by not having layoffs and with the delay of the surface

Government Operations committee  When you refer to the $800-million figure, that is for the authorities that were sought when the decision was made to add the six AOPS to the program of work. That authority included the price of the ship, which is around $400 million, as well as other things. There was also $150

Government Operations committee  I'll just finish, if you don't mind. There was an additional $250 million associated with all six of the ships, related to inflation, exchange rates and such things. The actual price of the six ships is in the region of $400 million, but as we went to seek these authorities, the

Government Operations committee  What I can tell you is that the sixth ship.... Okay, I'll tell you two things. The sixth ship has been negotiated at about $400 million. We're also tracking what we refer to as the “learning curve” between ships.

Government Operations committee  It's taking about 33% fewer labour hours to build the second ship versus the first ship, and about 10%—

Government Operations committee  There is a cap for all six, but we're also tracking where the efficiencies are between ships, and like any learning curve in a shipyard environment, at some point the curve starts to flatten. In fact, it's not really just with the ship, but in other learning curves like the produ

Government Operations committee  It has not yet been negotiated.