Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Johns, I'm surprised you're bringing up building in B.C. I wonder if you forget the NDP decision to spend half a billion dollars to build ferries in B.C. that were sold for $19 million for scrap. They were never really used. I think that sums up our capacity sometimes.
Mr. Collins, you talked about sovereign capacity, and I want to chat about that. We have the NSS, and we're perhaps down a road that we can't turn back on. You know, if it takes us 20 years to build a ship, I'm curious to know how you could claim that as a security issue, say, or sovereign capacity, when we really don't have an ability to build a ship within 10 or 15 years.
I'm wondering what you think the opportunity costs are in relation to the ITBs and also building here in Canada. I think in the PBO's original report from about four or five years ago, it was about a 25% premium. Should we perhaps re-examine that, or perhaps loosen it a bit, to look abroad and return that money to taxpayers, or to develop other industries within Canada? We don't build our own tanks here, and yet we don't claim that's a sovereignty issue. We don't build our own missiles here. We don't declare that a sovereignty issue. Why do we do it around ships?