Irving Shipbuilding has recently bought full-page ads in The Chronicle Herald and the Ottawa Citizen to defend the high cost of building Arctic/offshore patrol ships in Halifax.
Irving is hitting back at a CBC story that compares the purchase with cheaper patrol vessels overseas. Irving says the comparison is apples to oranges. (Conservative MP Chris Alexander called it apples to watermelons.)
For the most part, Irving is right. Smaller ships built years ago are going to cost much less.
The real question is not why the ships are so expensive. The high price tag is by design: we’re building custom-designed ships and building them here in Canada.
The better question is whether that’s the right path to follow. Buying new, unproven technology is what gave us the F-35 fighter jet fiasco, and it’s why we’ve paid millions of dollars for helicopters that are supposed to replace the Sea Kings but still can’t fly.
Yet we’re trying the same strategy again with the Arctic/offshore patrol fleet. One recent study makes a compelling case we’re heading for the same disastrous results.
The mandate for the Arctic/offshore patrol ships is to do offshore work on Canada’s coasts and also be able to patrol icy northern waters. Yet a recent report by the Rideau Institute and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives argues the ships will be able to do neither job well.
Co-authors Michael Byers and Stewart Webb say the ships will be too small to be effective icebreakers and will only be able to crash through thin ice in the warmer months. They also say the thick, reinforced hulls of the ships will make them too slow for patrolling jobs like chasing off smugglers or illegal fishing boats.
And of course, because we’re designing them from scratch, they will cost far more than an off-the-shelf design.
It’s an intriguing thesis, and unfortunately the government has taken little time to respond to it. Defence Minister Peter MacKay pointed out that Byers is a failed NDP election candidate and dismissed the report as flawed and biased.
An independent United States naval expert (whose organization’s policies prevent him from being named) echoed the concerns of the report. He said it sounds like the government is trying to build one ship for two very different jobs. That means either a very expensive ship or one that isn’t very good at either task.
The maritime security research team of the Canadian Naval Review, a quarterly published at Dalhousie University, found that the report contained interesting observations but sloppy methodology.
“Without further work to support the claims of Byers and Webb, the real strength of their argument lies in the questions they raise,” the research team wrote.
Now we’re left with those questions. Should we be combining Arctic and offshore duties into a single ship?
Another question is whether the navy will get ships with the capabilities it needs. A recent Parliamentary Budget Office report showed the government has abandoned its plans for state-of-the-art joint supply ships. Instead, it is aiming to replace the capacity that exists, and the PBO still expects the program to run well over budget.
The PBO only looked at two ships being built in Vancouver, but there’s no reason to expect the same problems won’t hit Halifax. The $3-billion price tag for the Arctic/offshore patrol ships has stayed the same for years, though purchasing power has decreased.
Ottawa still says it expects to buy six to eight Arctic/offshore patrol ships but almost no one believes eight is realistic anymore. The Byers-Webb report points out that the navy initially wanted the ships to be able to drive bow-first or stern-first, like Norwegian patrol vessels. That feature was ruled out; presumably it was too expensive.
The ships will still be built in Canada because it would be politically disastrous to move those jobs overseas now. Fair enough. There’s historically been a 20 to 30 per cent markup on building ships in Canada, says Ken Hansen, a maritime security analyst at Dalhousie.
That markup will likely be higher this time around because we’re basically restarting the entire industry, but Canadians seem prepared to swallow the extra cost in exchange for the economic benefits.
But are we building the right ships? Should we cut our losses now and buy off-the-shelf designs overseas? Most worrisome of all, have we allocated enough money?
The Parliamentary Budget Office report raises the spectre of the worst-case scenario: program failure. If we ultimately can’t build adequate ships for the shipbuilding program’s $35-billion price tag, we would have to shut down and start over from scratch.
We’re not there yet, and the shipbuilding program could still deliver on its promise. But we need to ask more questions and get more answers.
The stakes are too big to have this project become another procurement fiasco.
Original Article
Source: thechronicleherald.ca
Author: PAUL McLEOD
No comments:
Post a Comment