The Navy's not our only fleet crippled by government incompetence
The Coast Guard is in equally bad shape, perhaps worse, and the plan to save it sounds all too familiar, in the most dispiriting way
It takes a particular kind of incompetence to let a fleet of ocean-going vessels rust out. Canada is remarkably close to doing so twice.
Long-time readers of mine will know that a topic I’ve returned to frequently, to absolutely no evident effect, is the chronic underfunding of the Canadian military. In recent years, the problem has become particularly acute for the Royal Canadian Navy. The fleet lost both its last destroyers and their unique capabilities, and its supply ships. The two kinds of ships, vastly different in their capabilities, both dated back to around 1970, and both simply had run out of useful life by the second decade of this century. The Navy’s dozen frigates are in good shape, having recently been modernized, and the four submarines have at long last come up to speed. The converted civilian ship Asterix is functioning as an interim supply vessel. But the loss of the destroyers and supply ships, retired without replacement due to incompetence and neglect by Liberals and Tories alike, undeniably badly hurt the Navy.
Hmm, what’s that you say? The Coast Guard is a disaster, too? Gee, how could that have happened?
Yes, sadly, it turns out that the Navy wasn’t the only fleet rusting out. The Coast Guard is in equally bad shape, perhaps worse — and it’s all been happening most out of sight and out of mind.
I don’t exclude myself from that [emphasis added]. I don’t know the organization well, as it falls a bit outside my primary interests. The Coast Guard isn’t a military force in Canada. Its ships sail unarmed. The Coast Guard isn’t even a police force, per se. Law enforcement on Canadian seas is tasked to the RCMP, which may assign officers to Coast Guard vessels as needed. But the Coast Guard is a separate service, tasked with patrol but not enforcement, scientific research and search and rescue. In this sense, it’s actually fascinating — a special agency within the government providing services to many other departments and initiatives. But it’s a little off my radar, no pun intended, and I think that’s true for most Canadians [emphasis added, only so sadly true--and our media and politicians largely ignore it because it is not controversial like the CAF which might once in a while kill people].
But the one thing I did know about the Coast Guard is that its fleet is old. Very old. Its largest icebreaker was launched in 1966. It has two other heavy icebreakers, the younger of which was launched in April of 1983, just a few months after I was born. All told, the Coast Guard’s fleet is stretched beyond its effective limit: documents obtained by The Canadian Press last month showed that fully a third of the fleet’s large vessels were already past their expected service lives and unlikely to be replaced before rusting out.
It’s all very familiar, in the most dispiriting way. So is the government’s response.
Much like with the Navy, now that the fleet is literally about to fall apart, the government has shown up with a plan. Justin Trudeau announced in Vancouver on Wednesday that the Coast Guard would receive 18 new ships. Two would be of the same class of Arctic patrol ships that the Navy will soon take into service. Sixteen will be a mid-sized multi-purpose ship that only exists right now as a gleam in a procurement ministry bureaucrat’s eye. The budget is a shade under $16 billion, but considering that the vast majority of the ships haven’t even been designed yet, let alone constructed, that number is barely a placeholder.
There’s a column to be written about the decision to build two more Arctic patrol ships and give them to the Coast Guard. The patrol ships are military vessels — lightly armed, but warships nonetheless [not really, they're for "constabulary" duties]. They’ll have the advantage of youth, relative to the rest of the Coast Guard fleet, but that’s it — they’re not suited to its specific needs. The only reason they’re being given to the Coast Guard is to keep the shipyard that builds them humming during an election year. The last thing the Liberals need in the months before an election when they’re down in the polls is to have Irving laying off a bunch of workers in the Maritimes. This is no way to run a Coast Guard, yet here we are.
And the prime minister is barely pretending otherwise. When announcing the new ships, he couldn’t stop gushing about all the jobs it would create. So many new jobs, in fact, that Canada will need to bring a third shipyard into the national shipbuilding program — Quebec’s Davie shipyard, of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman trial fame, seems to be in line for some sizeable federal contracts. Preserving the Coast Guard’s operational capabilities is a bonus — a meaningful one, even, but no more than that. It’s really about the jobs.
It’s all very familiar, like I said: an asset vital to Canada being allowed to quite literally rust away without replacements because our government can’t get its act together. The solution is familiar, too: a jobs-creation program masquerading as a procurement effort. And there’s one more part of this that’s also familiar: the nagging sense that this will all get very badly screwed up somehow, and the Coast Guard will end up getting either much fewer ships than expected, or conceivably, none at all. It is, sadly, the Canadian way.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/matt-gurney-the-navys-not-our-only-fleet-crippled-by-government-incompetence?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1558720599
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