Submarines for the Arctic, it’s urgent

OTTAWA | Senators are urging the Trudeau government to quickly replace our obsolete submarines to monitor the Arctic, just as China announces that it is building an icebreaker that will carry submersibles capable of exploring our icy waters.

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“We have six submarines that can only navigate a few days a year and that are unable to navigate under the ice,” worries Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu.

Worse, currently, only one is fully operational, indicates the Defense.

However, “the Arctic will most likely become our future Panama Canal with the melting of the ice,” adds his colleague, Senator Jean-Guy Dagenais.

Both senators are members of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security, which on Wednesday tabled yet another devastating report listing our shortcomings and pressing needs in Arctic security that an investigation by the Log revealed in February.

The report includes 23 recommendations, including one on the need to equip our Armed Forces with polar submarines.

The Royal Canadian Navy submarine HMCS Victoria, the only one in the fleet to have been able to launch a torpedo.

Royal Canadian Navy

China-Russia partnership

In presenting this report, the senators highlighted the increase in maritime traffic in the sector, both military and commercial and touristic, and the growing interest of China and Russia for this strategic area and the natural resources it conceals. .

“The Arctic is of critical strategic importance and is now at a critical turning point,” said Mr. Dagenais.

“Failing to occupy it, others will occupy it,” adds Mr. Boisvenu.

To map the seabed and locate the resources there, Beijing also announced this week the construction of a third icebreaker 103 meters long which will transport submersibles specially designed for the exploration of the seabed of the North Pole and from the South Pole.

Only Russia currently has craft capable of carrying crews to the polar ocean floor, which is some 4,000 meters deep.

In 2007, the Russians installed their flag at the bottom of the ocean, at the North Pole, which triggered the fury of the Canadian government at the time.

Ottawa tablets the warnings

But despite the burst of the moment, since then, Ottawa has done nothing to match Russian capabilities, laments Senator Dagenais. He recalls that in 2017, the Senate tabled a report calling for the re-equipment of the army, but that this document was shelved.

“I find myself seven years later at the same platform where we ask the same things, so we have to admit that we have to stop filing on the tablet,” he said. Today it may be five minutes to midnight, not to say that it is five past midnight.

“It is time for the government to make a firm commitment to remedy this situation,” insists Senator Boisvenu.

Navy wants 12 submarines

The Royal Canadian Navy is currently working on the replacement of its six second-hand submarines, which only have about fifteen years of useful life left. She is asking for 8 to 12 new ones that could cost a minimum of $60 billion. But the government has not committed to anything specific so far.

“We are engaged in the modernization of our Victoria-class submarines,” said evasively the Minister of National Defense, Anita Anand, who was questioned on the subject in Great Britain Thursday morning.

While the replacement of our fleet could take 15 years – between the call for tenders and the delivery of the first submarine – the new Chinese icebreaker must go to sea with its submersibles on board from 2025. It will be operated by the military-affiliated Polar Research Institute of China, and will join two other icebreakers China has, the Xue Long and Xue Long 2.


Submarine emerging from arctic ice

The Xue Long also called Snow Dragon arrives here in the port of Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

AFP

Canada, on the other hand, has no icebreakers capable of patrolling our Arctic waters all winter long, so our scientists have had to call in a Russian icebreaker to escort them during their research in the region aimed at determining the borders of our submarine Arctic territory, a space that is disputed with us by Russia in particular.

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