Yes.
Evidence of meeting #21 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was procurement.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #21 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was procurement.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Conservative
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
It's a simple question. There's almost $10 million just in this one part, and there's another $40 million here, but Mr. Muldoon says there's almost $10 million of taxpayers' money going into a project where we've very clearly stated, for very many years, that there would not be public money going—
RAdm Patrick Finn
Into the infrastructure of the yard, into the projects themselves, to actually advance work on the project, so we created a—
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
That's what this says, so they're getting money to get the project going faster.
Conservative
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Right, but not additional money to get them up and running.
RAdm Patrick Finn
Yes. It's not additional money. We're advancing work, so rather than wait—
Conservative
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Once again, I'm sorry to interrupt, but could we please at least allow.... You may not agree with the answer—
Conservative
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
We're short on time. That's why I just don't want to get back to—
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
We'll be getting shorter on time if we keep getting interjections, so could we have an answer in one minute, Mr. Finn.
RAdm Patrick Finn
Very quickly, if I could, then, it's not infrastructure. It's actually not progress payments. It's actually advancing specific work on the projects horizontally to benefit all the projects. It's work that would otherwise be done in an inefficient way in each project. We created the horizontal ability to actually improve taxpayers' value for money and to actually advance work to succeed in a long-term build program for the yard.
Assistant Deputy Minister, Acquisitions Branch, Department of Public Works and Government Services
Mr. Chair, if I may, I'll put it in really plain language, because it is a kind of fundamental shipbuilding principle.
Normally in shipbuilding you'd build a long run of many of the same kind of ship, and the client department would pay at the beginning. It would say, “All right, do the engineering that we want you to do on the first ship and then do it again for all the others and achieve your shipbuilding efficiencies.”
The build program that we have asked the Vancouver shipyard to do, as I said at the outset, is several small runs of different kinds of ships—three, two, one, one, and one—for two client departments. What we've said at the very beginning is to do this engineering in standard processes and then use it again on every single ship build. This means that Canada is both gaining efficiencies and standardization and saving money.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
We're paying money to save money. Okay.
How much money altogether are we going to be saving by giving money to them? We've seen about $70 million so far. How much more?
RAdm Patrick Finn
I believe the contract is for $40 million. It is, again, work that otherwise would have been done later or probably at greater cost, so it's actually advancing work in each of those projects. It's done earlier, so it is not in addition to any of the work that would have been done in any of the projects.
Conservative
Steven Blaney Conservative Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC
Well, yes, but what we see is a cost increase. We haven't seen any of the costs of those ships diminish.
Mr. Chair, I'm not really satisfied with the answers we got today. I wish that we could find ways to get a clearer explanation on this program and a convincing demonstration that taxpayer money is being well served by the execution of the strategy.