Flawed shipbuilding strategy needs to be fixed

By snubbing Davie, Ottawa seems prepared to send jobs abroad, Alex Vicefield writes.

If you thought things couldn’t get worse than the federal government’s broken and wildly over-budget Phoenix pay system, you haven’t been paying enough attention to the fiasco-in-waiting known as the National Shipbuilding Strategy.

Nor, it seems, have the cabinet ministers supposed to be overseeing the program — leaving Canada’s navy illequipped for at least another decade, hundreds of Quebec workers about to lose their jobs and Canadian taxpayers on the hook for the program’s spiralling costs.

Unless urgent adjustments are made to the strategy, the navy will have to rent fully crewed support ships from Chile and Spain to fill the gap, rather than keep the money, skills and jobs here in Canada.

The alarm bells should have been ringing last month when, in a written response to a parliamentary committee, the associate deputy minister of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Kevin Stringer, declared that the actual delivery dates for all ships to be built under the strategy at Seaspan’s shipyard in Vancouver are now secret and cannot be released, even to members of Parliament.

This unusual response came after the new deputy commissioner of the Canadian Coast Guard, Andy Smith, revealed that Seaspan will not be able to start construction of the navy’s ships until it has completed four other ships for the Coast Guard. The dates he provided paint an entirely different story to what the public has previously been told and, even in a best-case scenario, means construction of the support ships will begin no earlier than 2023, with the first ship delivered in 2026.

The Department of National Defence continues to maintain the first joint support ship from Seaspan will be ready by 2021. But not a single ship has been delivered in the six years since the strategy was launched, and now we are to believe the Vancouver shipyard will suddenly deliver five ships in four years.

With Davie currently contracted to provide only one “interim” naval support ship until the Joint Support Ships are ready — a ship being delivered this month — Canada will not be able to deliver on its recently published defence policy, which requires having a naval support ship on each coast, for at least another decade.

To cover the 10-year gap, Davie has offered to build and lease to the navy a second naval support ship. But accepting our offer would, it seems, be too painful an admission for senior bureaucrats who were the proud architects of the current strategy.

This past weekend, Premier Philippe Couillard called on the federal government to grant more public contracts to the Davie shipyard in Lévis as he and opposition members joined a protest in support of workers at the resurrected giant in Canada’s shipbuilding industry.

Ministers whose regions will receive windfall contracts under the strategy seem prepared to see contracts given to Chile and Spain rather than keep the money and jobs here in Canada, as the Department of National Defence maintains that the navy can make do with renting Chilean and Spanish naval supply ships over the next decade in order to plug the gap.

As with the Phoenix pay system debacle, this shipbuilding fiasco speaks to the federal bureaucracy’s inability to own up to the depth and severity of problems at an early stage and develop a timely plan to deal with them.

Meanwhile, nearly 800 skilled shipbuilders in Quebec who have laboured day-in, day-out for two years to deliver a vitally needed support ship for the navy are about to lose their jobs just before Christmas and the navy will not have its muchneeded additional support ships for another 10 years.

So as Quebec launches the largest naval vessel ever delivered from a Canadian shipyard, is it any wonder that the province is up in arms? The rest of Canada should be, too.