Government Operations committee  Is that for me?

Government Operations committee  I'll give a short answer, for sure. It's a two-parter. There's aid to civil authority, which is what the CAF have been doing on national disaster response, and on COVID by going into nursing homes, and there's a whole other side conversation about whether this is really the role for the armed forces to be doing.

Government Operations committee  We're dealing with the Berlin class. It's a German design. It's at the heart of the joint support ships being built in Vancouver. The Canadian surface combatant is based on a still-being-modified version of the type 26 that originates in the U.K. There was a conscious decision over a decade ago to move down that route and to not have a localized, Canadian-made design.

Government Operations committee  It will definitely be part of the timeline of reintroducing that aircraft and at some point we're going to have to deal with two training regimens for CF-18s and F-35s. As my colleague noted, that's expensive and complex.

Government Operations committee  Sustainability is certainly a key part. When we purchase large-scale military platforms and equipment, we expect them to last for decades. That's been the trend going back to the sixties, and this is the vision that has been adopted for this particular ambitious project. We're not the only ones doing this.

Government Operations committee  The biggest challenge for all three shipyards is that the schedule is king. If it's a continuous build, it's a question of what else is in the pipeline to ensure the viability of those shipyards. They're there for building and not just for simply sustaining and modifying ships.

Government Operations committee  Sir, that's a great question. It goes back to something I had in my opening remarks, which was communications and better transparency. What is going into the costing models? We're told that the budget of $62 billion is supposed to be satisfactory going forward, yet we're also hearing that the yard in Halifax needs some type of modification to deal with the extra large version of ship to be built there, which wasn't envisioned over a decade ago.

Government Operations committee  It's a great question. We lost the ability to do localized Canadian design of complex naval shipbuilding after the 1990s. One of the risks that's presented when you're doing the NSS is whether we rebuild that capability, as well, to try to do designs. How much time and cost does that take?

Government Operations committee  I'm sorry. Now I have a better appreciation of your question. I'd say geography, shipbuilding, the longest coastline in the world, three oceans, alliances and the transatlantic. Also, increasingly now, we're looking at getting involved in the Indo-Pacific. We're partnering up with Japan, Australia and South Korea.

Government Operations committee  Well, there is already a centralized office, the national shipbuilding strategy office, set up to do it. I think the big challenge is just in getting clear, consistent political and bureaucratic alignment and direction off the top and ensuring that it's there consistently over what will be decades.

Government Operations committee  I would love to see the details on that pitch they made off-the-cuff after losing. They never had to explain it and they never had to be held accountable. That's the beauty of losing while making a Hail Mary pass like—

Government Operations committee  That's an excellent question. I think it's the nature of shipbuilding. The dollar values are associated not just with building the ship, but with sustaining it over decades. That's really a key distinction. The other is that aircraft—

Government Operations committee  All of our allies are encountering this global professional skill demand. If you go to—

Government Operations committee  That's what I'm talking about. It's not just the manufacturing; it's the project management side. As I mentioned before, there is no school pumping out loads of people to manage these projects. Once you shut down things after a decade and try to rebuild them, which is what we're doing, you're going to encounter these massive human resources constraints.

Government Operations committee  It's one of the key arguments behind creating this separate defence procurement agency responsible for acquisitions in defence. You start building the human resource capacity and the institutional knowledge. To your point, you don't have someone who is simply buying photocopiers in one part of their career and is now moving over to do massive, complex shipbuilding acquisitions.