It came out today that the top guns at the Royal Canadian Navy have picked a name for the second of the new ships in the Arctic Patrol fleet. She'll be known as HMCS Margaret Brooke.
The first will be named HMCS Harry DeWolf.
Both sound like perfectly adequate names for ships in Canada's new Arctic Patrol armada. There's only one problem with this story...
There are no ships.
That's right.
Although the ship-building program to provide six to eight dedicated ice-worthy patrol vessels was first announced with great fan-fare in 2007, as of yet no keels have been laid and no steel has been cut. In the meantime, numerous re-announcements of the program, replete with more fan-fare and photo-ops, have masked the fact that Ottawa nincompoops have squandered many years and many hundreds of millions in "designing" a ship that is a straight-up copy of a Norwegian design that is already serving in several navies.
What's to design?
To add irony to insult, the much ballyhooed discovery of the Franklin expedition ships last year was forced to rely on a chartered Russian ship because the Canadian Navy lacks the operational capability to operate in the Arctic waters Canada claims to own.
Maybe they should stop posturing and get on with building the boats already!
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