The Canadian Coast Guard is also designing a new polar-class icebreaker, the CCGS John G. Diefenbaker, to replace its existing heavy icebreaker, the Louis S. St-Laurent (pictured), which is due to be retired in 2017.
The Harper government is going to have to decide whether resupplying
Canada’s navy or Arctic sovereignty is more important thanks to a
looming collision at a Vancouver shipyard.
The Royal Canadian Navy
is designing new joint support ships to replace its 50-year-old
resupply vessels, which were supposed to have been retired in 2012 and
have become environmentally unsound and prohibitively expensive to
maintain.
The Canadian Coast Guard is also designing a new
polar-class icebreaker, the CCGS John G. Diefenbaker, to replace its
existing heavy icebreaker, the Louis S. St-Laurent, which is due to be
retired in 2017.
But while both are expected to be ready for
construction at the same time, the Vancouver shipyard slated to build
them can only handle one project at a time.
This scheduling
conflict was acknowledged in a recent Defence Department report tabled
in Parliament, which noted that “the Joint Support Ship and the Polar
Icebreaker are progressing on a very similar schedule such that they
both could be ready for construction at the same time.”
The report
goes on to say the first joint support ship will be delivered around by
2018, “assuming JSS is not delayed by the initial Coast Guard projects
and the Polar Icebreaker program.”
Any delay in replacing the
navy’s existing resupply vessels could be potentially devastating for
the maritime fleet because new ships are needed immediately, while
delays undercut the purchasing power of the $2.6 billion set aside for
the project.
This was underscored by a Parliamentary Budget Office
report in March that found it could cost as much as $4.13 billion to
replace the resupply ships and not $2.6 billion, in large part because
of delays already incurred.
Yet delaying construction of the
$800-million John G. Diefenbaker could cause its own problems as it
could leave the Coast Guard without significant icebreaking capabilities
as the Louis St-Laurent is already slated to be decommissioned before
the Diefenbaker comes online.
Deciding which project has priority
will likely be a political decision — and the government has not yet
figured out how to address the competing timelines.
“A decision
has not yet been made,” Public Works spokeswoman Lucie Brosseau said in
an email. “The (National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy) secretariat,
working together with the Department of National Defence and Canadian
Coast Guard, is currently developing the framework for the sequencing
decision for the JSS and the Polar Icebreaker projects.”
Vancouver shipbuilder Seaspan Marine, which owns the shipyards where the vessels will be built, did not respond to inquiries.
Conference
of Defence Association analyst David Perry said the government faces a
tough decision as the navy needs new resupply ships and the Coast Guard
needs a new icebreaker.
“The navy needs to get new supply ships
ASAP,” Perry said. “But on the other hand our icebreakers were built
many, many decades ago.
“They’re basically going to have to decide
whether they want to do Arctic operations first, or whether they want
to do open-ocean naval operations first,” he added. “They need both and
there’s no easy choice.”
The pending conflict is yet the latest
issue facing the $35-billion national shipbuilding strategy, which the
Harper government has been holding up as an unmitigated success against a
backdrop of problems related to the F-35, search-and-rescue airplanes
and other military procurement projects.
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