Canada’s four submarines could be called floating money pits — except they don’t float that much. They spend more time being repaired than they do sailing, and now two of them are headed for drydock for the better part of a year so faulty welding can be fixed.
This is the latest of the problems that have plagued the subs since Canada bought them secondhand from the U.K. in 1998. That purchase has turned out to be a financial and operational disaster.
It’s time to ask some hard questions: Do we need these costly vessels? Can we afford them? At what point do we stop pouring money into repairs?
HMCS Victoria and its sister, HMCS Chicoutimi, will be docked at Victoria for several months because several hundred welds need to be inspected, and repaired if necessary, before the submarines can return to the open sea.
Being docked is what the subs do best. Put into service from 1990 to 1993, the four Upholder submarines were decommissioned in 1994, as the U.K. decided to go with an all-nuclear submarine fleet. They sat in the saltwater until 1998, when Canada bought them to replace its aging Oberon submarines, naming them after Canadian cities — Victoria, Chicoutimi, Windsor and Corner Brook. They became known as Victoria-class submarines.
Victoria was commissioned by the Canadian Navy in December 2000, the first of the four vessels to go into service, but it wasn’t declared fully operational until 2012. All of the subs have been plagued with problems, spending vastly more time being repaired and maintained they spend moving about in the water. The original purchase price of $750 million has been exceeded by subsequent costs.
The challenge with a secondhand flivver is trying to determine how much fixing up to do — it just keeps costing more and more money to keep it going, and after you have spent all that money, you still have an old jalopy.
That’s a glib comparison — a submarine is a vastly complex vessel, and maintenance is constant, even for new submarines.
But these are not new submarines, and they weren’t in good shape to start with.
“It was apparent from the start that the submarines were flawed,” wrote defence analysts Michael Byer and Stewart Webb in the Times Colonist in 2013. “Initially, the British experienced problems with the diesel engines, which were designed for railroad locomotives and not the rapid stops and starts required of submarines. They also struggled with defects in the torpedo-tube slide valves that are supposed to prevent the inner torpedo doors from opening while the outer doors are ajar.
“The British decommissioned the submarines in 1994 and just tied them up to a wharf. There, they languished in salt water for four years awaiting a buyer, and another two to six years before Canada took possession of them. During this time, the submarines suffered serious corrosion, to the point where the diving depth of HMCS Windsor remains restricted to this day.”
That doesn’t mean the subs have been useless — they have been used to help curtail the international drug trade and with other operations the Navy has been involved in. But the cost has been high.
Should they be replaced? Australia intends to build 12 new French-designed diesel-electric submarines at a total cost of $43 billion US. If Canada followed that example, it would, at least, be a boon for the domestic shipbuilding industry, but at a heavy cost to the national budget.
But we have learned, over the past eight years, that submarines are not an essential element in the Navy. It fulfilled its role without them, and we should question the need to keep spending billions on these costly vessels.
