It was in January 2015, a year before its rout, that the Harper government suddenly awarded the acquisition of all the ships that Canada could need over the next twenty-five years and even more, according to this. which was then qualified as a “maritime strategy”. A strange strategy, the first characteristic of which, of course, was not to entrust anything to the most important shipyards, which are located in Quebec. And you, logically, would you buy in a single contract all the cars that you are going to own during the next few years? The ability of suppliers to meet the schedule and the estimates does not appear to have been part of the selection criteria either.
So, almost seven years later, where are we in this brilliant acquisition policy, an adventure of some 100 billion? In particular, the Irving shipyard was given the exclusive right to supply 15 frigates for the Canadian Navy at an estimated cost of $ 26 billion, three days before it was also granted exclusive rights to supply the coast guard ships. All that seems to have come to fruition since is the awarding of a design contract to the Lockheed Martin firm in February 2019, four years later, in fact four years too late, when the estimated value of the contract had risen to $ 60 billion and the date of the first delivery set at 2031, 16 years after the contract was awarded. The Canadian navy would have had everything to gain by awarding this design contract to Lockheed Martin itself four to six years earlier and did not need Irving to do so. As for the few Coast Guard vessels already in service, the media are not very complimentary about their quality.
With the few resources at the Irving shipyard’s disposal, if all goes well, and extremely well, the last delivery would take place, we are now told, in 2041, almost thirty years after the drafting of the technical specifications. In other words, at the rate that technology evolves, our navy will then take delivery of a beautiful brand new antique! It will be the same anyway for all frigates delivered from more than a dozen years! And no one in our government has shown the slightest reaction!
We already understand that by 2041, the existing frigates launched during the 1990s, will then have reached the venerable age of 40 to 50 years of service, which, once again, constitutes a total aberration at the rate at which technology is evolving. . In fact, one would have to ask whether, during a certain period of transition, Canada will still truly have a navy of war.
Play with fire
We have to face the truth: Canada has always played with fire with the limited resources it gives itself to protect its vast territory. Is Canada really in a position to ensure its sovereignty over its territorial waters; to prevent foreign powers from settling down somewhere, or to get rid of their radioactive waste there, or to prevent smugglers from landing in less than two from 500 to 1000 illegal immigrants in an isolated Inuit village of the Nunavut or Labrador?
Our Prime Minister’s talents as a theater teacher will not be enough to make the great powers of the world believe that Canada really takes the defense of its territory seriously and that it would seem to have the means to do so. defend. It would be prudent to immediately better allocate the construction of these ships according to the capacity of the yards to speed up their commissioning and to proceed without wasting time with the design of the next generation of ships. Absolutely no one would lose, not even the Irving shipyard, obviously so politically powerful!
We cannot rely solely on our aviation either, whose aircraft repaired with salvaged parts from old aircraft purchased from Australians could end up missing!