Navy's East Coast flagship probably 'will never sail again,'

A sad end for such a proud ship. I have a video of her; a guided tour from bridge to engines taken while in the Gulf for Gulf War I. I keep forgetting to transfer it from VHS. One day I'll remember.

Looks like you folks will soon enough have another warship serving as a reef for fish.

Well, that leaves the Halifax class to hold up the load until either the RCN puts more hulls in the water or until Canada simply cedes her territorial waters to the USA (by default).

That's not good news for Canadian sovereignty given that our current President expresses almost nothing but contempt for our closest allies.

At this stage farming the entire job out to the US is probably the cheaper and smarter alternative. Fixing Athabaskan or replacing it with something slightly younger would probably cost three times as much as buying a brand new littoral frigate would. It's DOD Procurement, baby! Why pay a near stock price when you can Canadian-kit it up and end up paying five to six times as much as anyone else on the planet?!?! wOOt!

Deep Integration.

Then cancel it twice, pay for cancellation fees without receiving any product, and rewrite the specifications so that the most expensive option is the only one that fits!

It's our way!

Why? What is wrong that successive governments have not been able to get a handle on this? I can see those Liberal corrupt, politics playing wastrels doing this. But we've had 9 years of conservative government now. As we know, they are the party of sound fiscal prudence, so what's going on here?

Operation Don't-Give-A-Fuck apparently, at least not until the day returns when it becomes politically advantageous to have photo-ops with the pongos again. Austerity forever, swabbies!

The problem is that your laws and regulations (and cronyism, too) that require Canadian content to be grafted onto almost every procurement effectively causes the death of all too many such procurements. You folks need to move past this or just give up on having a military force of any consequence.

Half-measures are a waste. Have a navy or don't, but don't play at having a navy or brag about the ships you plan to build while everyone knows damn right well those plans won't ever see the inside of a shipyard.

My own desires here are (in order):

1. Rebuild the shipyards at Esquimalt and Halifax and build your own navy. Then sell the proven ships to other countries and at the same time keep your shipyards busy and your shipbuilders practiced in their skills.

2. Buy American. Why? Because then you can closely integrate with the US Navy, leverage the US facilities in Bremerton and along the US east coast, score a couple of nuclear subs that can be maintained at US facilities and then probably end up paying LESS for these more capable ships and subs because you'll easily get the US Congress to heavily subsidize the purchases and maintenance agreements that will benefit unionized American shipyard workers.

2a. You can also leverage that same deal to require technology transfers to Canadian industry and maybe even score some jobs in the US shipyards for qualified Canadians.

3. Stop f*cking around and just buy what you need from someone else without any ridiculous Canadian content requirements to muck up a proven platform.

Sounds sensible. While I'm no hawk, don't want us to spend money on a force that can go on foreign adventures, we do need a capable navy that can protect our shores. Maybe we should nationalize shipbuilding, it's not as if our private yards are all that cost effective. Build all our navy ships, coast guard and ferries in two yards, one on each coast.

The ability to strike a foe at home is a deterrent to a foe striking you at home. It's a necessary complement to a force. But keep in mind you don't need a surface fleet for that purpose when maybe six-to-twelve cruise missile capable attack subs would do the job just fine. Australia's navy is a good model for Canada to consider. The Aussies have a capable littoral surface fleet that's bolstered by probably the most aggressive sub force in the Pacific. No Chinese fleet in existence would be able to make landfall on Australia and the Chinese know this.



100% in agreement! I had not considered the ferries but you're spot on to include them!

Got a bud in Swissieland who is exRAN, they have almost 50 boats to play with.

I wonder if we even have 20 left, never mind anything that actually works.

Twenty is about the correct number of your operational fleet at any given time right now figuring that the remainder will be (more or less) alongside for repairs or refit.

There are many things I'm envious of the Aussies of, their navy is one of them. And an apt comparison in size of the economy.

Isn't the urge to nationalize the shipyards one of the main reasons that the overall price per ship ends up skyrocketing? It makes no sense at all to do that, not when we can't effectively and efficiently compete with countries like the US, Japan, or Germany who have shipbuilding down to a science. It's no different at all from WW2 when Canada adopted the Sherman tank just because the effort to create our own all-Canadian built vehicle was too prohibitively expensive because our assembly lines were just too far behind what the US could do practically immediately.

The Aussies also have the motivation of being too close to China that they have to kick in more effort on their own instead of expecting the US to provide it. Canada's incredibly luxury of proximity to the US, where the Americans will automatically and instantaneously go into attack mode in the event of any incident on Canadian soil, gives us a cushion of complacency and laziness that other countries like Australia, Britain, the Europeans, or Israel can't risk adopting as their own unannounced policy.