Wait ends with start of shipbuilding work
Steel is being pounded into shape for the first of the federal government’s offshore fisheries science vessels being built here at Seaspan Shipyards.
The construction, signalling the long-awaited beginning of the Conservative government’s National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy at this yard, is akin to building with Lego. Parts of the vessel are in blocks at different locations in the yard; those pieces will eventually be brought together to form a 63-metre ship.
The offshore fisheries science vessel will be made of 41 such blocks, explains Seaspan Shipyard president Brian Carter as he leads a reporter on a tour of the facilities.
“It’s much more efficient,” Carter explains of the process and of the government’s shipbuilding strategy.
“There’s a change in how shipbuilding is being done. We’ve gone from piecemeal projects to more of a manufacturing line.”
Seaspan was selected in 2011 by the government to build the non-combat vessels as part of the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy, or NSPS. It hopes to eventually construct 17 ships, including various science vessels, a Polar-class icebreaker for the Coast Guard and two Joint Support Ships for the Royal Canadian Navy.
Irving, on the East Coast, will build the navy’s new warships and Arctic/offshore patrol vessels.
So far, Seaspan has a contract for work on Joint Support Ship design and to buy equipment it will need for building the JSS, Carter said. An actual contract for the ships has still to be awarded.
But the procurement strategy, estimated to cost taxpayers $36 billion, continues to be dogged by controversy. Concerns have been raised by the Canadian military and Auditor General Michael Ferguson about whether there will be enough money to finance the ambitious scheme.
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau says that if elected he would pull Canada out of the U.S.-led F-35 stealth-fighter program and select a less costly jet to replace the military’s CF-18s. The savings would be pumped into the shipbuilding program, which isn’t properly financed, the Liberals say.
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper has dismissed those concerns.
“All of our shipbuilders are up to their eyeballs in work because we have the largest shipbuilding program in history,” Harper said.
It’s near a shift change at the yard and about 50 workers are welding and doing other work on the science vessel. Another 120 employees at a nearby location are preparing for the eventual construction of the JSS in late 2016, Carter said.
The Vancouver yard employs around 600. When the $2.6billion JSS project gets underway in earnest, that will increase to 1,300. Another 800 are in the company’s yard in Victoria. That facility will do some of the finishing work for the ships.
Carter said national procurement strategy is designed to put an end to the boom-and-bust cycle of shipbuilding in which a company would receive a contract, hire workers, build the ship, then lay off the employees when it was done.
In its place, the strategy offers steady work for Seaspan over a seven-to-10-year period. After that, the firm hopes to parlay the expertise built up into other commercial work.
It’s taken a while to get to this point, say critics, who note the government’s ship projects have been plagued with delays.
Harper announced the Arctic Offshore Patrol Ships in 2007, saying they would be operating by 2013. Construction of the vessels only started this summer at Irving, with the first ship expected by 2018.
The JSS that Seaspan will eventually build was announced by the Conservatives in 2006 and was supposed to be sailing by 2012. But the project was derailed in 2008 because of a lack of money and had to be restarted.
Now brought in under the umbrella of the NSPS, the first ship is expected to be operating in 2020, with the second in 2021.
Carter said the delays were expected, since shipyards on both coasts had to reinvest and rebuild their facilities. Seaspan, for instance, pumped $170 million of its own money into upgrading its facilities.
“It does take a long time to rebuild your shipbuilding industry and that is an important part of the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy,” he explained. “We have to rebuild our technical capability. The supplier base needs to be resurrected to build that eco-system that surrounds the shipyards.”
With that now in place, Carter says, the procurement strategy will ramp up. Once design work is done on the JSS, Seaspan will turn its attention to the Polar-class icebreaker.
That ship was to have been built starting in 2013 and delivered in 2017. It’s now not expected until 2022 as the government decided the JSS was needed first.
Carter says that once work is underway, it will take two years to build the 150-metre ship and another six months for testing, commissioning and training the Coast Guard personnel to operate the vessel.
“That is a very capable, (a) beast of a ship,” he said. “It will be quite the flagship for Canada.”
In 2011, I saw the same pollsters say we’d be fourth in Quebec, so I don’t pay attention to that.
Thomas Mulcair
NDP Leader