Canada's submarine fleet finally firing on more than one cylinder

Before Canada bought a second-hand sub fleet from the UK, the Brits had tried to fob their submarines off on Pakistan, Portugal, and Chile, to no avail.

But along comes Johnny Canuck with stars in his eyes and a hard-on for submarines. Yessiree, when you've got all this coastline you definitely need a sub fleet! Nobody seems sure why, but apparently it's got something to do with Putin.

The UK subs were designed in the seventies, built in the eighties, commissioned in 1990, and put into storage four years later. The official reason was that the Cold War was over and they didn't need them anymore. The real reason was that they were crap. Anyone who ever owned a car or motorcycle built in Britain in the '80's wouldn't expect their submarines to be any better.

But buy them we did. There ensued fifteen plus years of refitting, rebuilding, repairing, renovating, renovating the repairs, rebuilding the renovations, refitting the refits, and general dinking around, to the tune of billions of dollars.

And for good reason, I might add.

Unlike your forty year old car or motorcycle, when a submarine conks out, you can't just thumb a ride to the nearest town.

But you can breathe easy, taxpayers of Canada! Finally, some good news on the submarine file;

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Royal Canadian Navy commander Vice-Admiral Ron Lloyd said the diesel-powered submarines — HMCS Chicoutimi, Victoria, Corner Brook, and Windsor - have finally turned a corner.

Lloyd specifically pointed to HMCS Chicoutimi’s having recently spent 197 days in the Pacific and Asia even as HMCS Windsor was patrolling the Mediterranean with NATO as proof the submarines are living up to their potential.

The fact we had two boats concurrently deployed, if that doesn’t speak to the success of the program, I don’t know what does. (National Post, Jan, 2019)

Isn't that great news! After almost twenty years and billions of dollars spent, our submarine program is a proven success because the Royal Canadian Navy can put two submarines to sea at the same time...  

Putin won't be messing with us now!

Pot-addled hillbilly beats serious journalists at Macleans to story by almost a year

Compare these headlines.

The sinking of the Canadian Navy.  That's from Macleans in August 2015.

Royal Canadian Navy sinking fast. That's from the perpetually inebriated think-tank here at Falling Downs, in October of 2014.

You'd almost think Scott Gilmore reads this blog, wouldn't you?

Well, maybe not... anybody who gives a shit was probably aware that our navy was sinking long before either of those stories. Gilmore and I obviously both give a shit, perhaps not for the same reasons, but still...

I ran into the Macleans story because I was looking for stuff around Canadian military procurement. Those 18 Boeing Super Hornets that are supposed to "temporarily" tide over our pathetic excuse for an air force are in the news again.

Eighteen airplanes for 6.3 billions. That works out to 350 millions per by my math. To do what? Stop Putin's aggression?

Thanks for the laugh! Hey, just strike Putin off your Christmas card mailing list if you're pissed at Putin. It'll have about the same impact on Putin's imaginary aggression as those eighteen warplanes... but look at the savings!

But seriously; we've been replacing our CF-18s for ten or fifteen years. We've been replacing our aging (and let's face it, we're way beyond "aging" here) Sea King helicopters for twice as long. The Harper gang was getting boffo press on our new fleet of warships for ten solid years without ever building a ship.

It's the Canadian way, eh? Talk tough and show up for the photo-ops.

Then, do nothing.

Wait for next photo-op and repeat.

And it's been going on long enough that we can safely say it's a bipartisan thing.

Pot addled hillbilly beats Maclean's to the story by a year

Here's Maclean's a few weeks ago; The sinking of the Canadian Navy.

Here's this blog, almost a year ago; Canadian Navy Sinking Fast.

Geez, you'd almost think Scott Gilmour has been reading this blog, no?

Royal Canadian Navy spends $150,000 per day to rent foreign supply ship

Apparently that's because the new Canadian supply ships that the politicians have been promising since 2004 remain on the drawing board.


And that's because the Harper gang believes in getting the most bang for the taxpayers dollar. They have long concluded that they get the most bang with the announcement of a new shipbuilding project. That's why the Harper years have been one continuous smorgasbord of ship-building announcements. The new supply ships, the new ice-breakers, the new coastal patrol vessels; all have been repeatedly announced.


Many have even been named!


None have been built!


Because actually building the ships that the Harper gang keeps announcing would cost way more than simply announcing them. The bang for the buck quotient goes right down the shitter.


So don't think of the pitiful state of the Royal Canadian Navy as a Harper fail; see it instead as evidence of shrewd stewardship of hard-working Canadians' tax dollars.

Canada names another imaginary Arctic Patrol Vessel

If you're keeping track, HMCS William Hall is the fourth of the new Arctic Patrol Vessels to be named by the Government of Canada. Assistant Defence Minister Julian Fantino was at the Africville Museum in Halifax yesterday to announce the good news.

The bad news is that there isn't actually a ship to which the Royal Canadian Navy can affix that lovely name. First announced in 2007, Canada's Arctic fleet has been the subject of numerous photo-ops and good-news announcements since, although no ships have been built!

That may be about to change, however. Apparently Public Works Minister Diane Finley is so fed up with the lack of progress that she barged into the Irving yards in Dartmouth last week, rolled up her sleeves, fired up a cutting torch, pulled down her goggles, and personally began cutting steel for the first of the patrol ships!

Or maybe that was just another photo-op?

Remembering when Canada used to build ships

The Harper gang held a photo-op/presser today where Defence Minister Jason Kenney announced that the government was entering into "preliminary discussions" about turning a used oil tanker into a Royal Canadian Navy supply ship.

Back in the day, the government used to make an announcement when they'd signed a contract to have Company X build X number of ships.

And then the ships actually got built! I know, because I worked at the Irving yard in Saint John in the early '90's.

Saint John Shipbuilding.

We built real ships!

But not no more. Now they have the photo-op/presser when they're announcing "preliminary discussions."

What the fuck does that mean?

Well, we're sorta thinking about building a few ships... what do you guys think about it?

That's pretty much the way it goes these days...

Just announcing that you're planning to start talking about stuff qualifies as a Harper Action Plan.

Canada can't build ships but Navy brass keeps busy picking names for them

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!

The would-be Warrior King who cannot find his big-boy war pants

Defence Minister Jason Kenney and his parliamentary secretary James Bezan were spinning yarns last week about the Royal Canadian Navy's derring-do in the Black Sea. Those darned Ruskies tried to intimidate our brave men and women in uniform, but nosiree, we stared 'em down, we did!

Turns out the tall tales were mostly just wishful thinking. The Canadians are in the Black Sea as part of NATO exercises intended to intimidate Russia, yet nobody at NATO can confirm the Canadians' story. A BBC journalist with the fleet claims Russian surveillance aircraft came no closer than 128 kilometres, while the supposed confrontation with a Russian warship never happened at all. Maybe somebody at DND got metres and kilometres mixed up, an easy enough mistake to make, especially in the heat of a close call (or possibly not that close) with Putin's evil legions.

After all, facing possible enemies isn't part of the day to day drill for our Royal mariners. The war they're fighting on the high seas is the War on Drugs. Here they are seizing six tonnes of hashish in the Arabian Sea in 2013. Here's a big heroin bust in the Indian Ocean a year later. And hold the phone, here's two headline-grabbin' busts in one week last October... and another one just last week!

We may have lost in Afghanistan, but at least we're winning the war on drugs!

Like all the best wars of modern times though, the war on drugs is never over, and it occurred to Harper's brain trust some years ago that the Royal Canadian Navy would need some new kit to keep up the good fight. The Harper gang announced a new shipbuilding program to much fanfare back in 2010, and have re-announced it to varying degrees of additional fanfare several more times since, but so far all that the new shipbuilding program has produced is this spiffy video.

Latest rumours on actual ships are that the yards might begin cutting steel by 2020.

Meanwhile, let's not forget the war on terror. Alas, the latest round in our war on terror has pretty much disappeared into that ever-threatening fog of war. When big Steve sent sixty-nine of our brave men and women in uniform into Iraq last year they were on a "training" mission to bring the Iraqi Kurds up to snuff on how to shoot guns and other war-type stuff that, after the last fifty years of fighting Iraqis, Syrians, Turks, and each other, they apparently need "training" to figure out.

And wouldn't you know it, before you can say "pants on fire," there's been a bad case of mission creep and our trainers are shooting up the bad guys and coming home dead.

That's the way we roll here in Harper's Canada. Cynically putting "our brave men and women in uniform" in harm's way just to goose the polls in an election year has become completely unremarkable where it should instead be completely unacceptable.

We've almost completed the transition from peace-makers to war-mongers.

It was therefore gratifying to see Canadians out protesting in considerable numbers against Harper's latest initiative to remake Canada as a police state, the odious Bill C-51.

Perhaps we're waking up.

Making up news out of nothing

I see where John Ivison, one of the few non-interns still writing copy at Postmedia, is in a flap because the project management contract for the Canadian Surface Combatant shipbuilding program has gone to Irving Shipbuilding.

Since the actual building of the ships on this shipbuilding contract was primarily awarded to Irving years ago, anybody with half a brain would realize that the only option for overall contract management was Irving.

So some lobbyists from no-hope outside contractors are now kicking up a fuss? How is this news? That's what lobbyists get paid to do!

There are many legitimate questions about the CSC shipbuilding contract. If all our navy is doing is drug interdiction for the DEA and imaginary terror suppression missions for NATO, do we really need this new fleet? The obvious answer to that is NO!

However, if our government is determined to upgrade the RCN, the ships have to be built in Canada, and the overall contract management can only be managed in Canada.

As the lead contractor, Irving is the only responsible choice for overall project management.

Canadian Navy bans booze

In an apparent attempt to cement their reputations as the Milquetoasts of the High Seas, RCN brass has decreed that henceforth booze will not be available shipboard while at sea.

The reason?

Last summer, while the HMCS Whitehorse was not at sea, but tied up in San Diego, three of the laddies got involved in some shit-faced assholery ashore.

Like that's the first time that's happened in the history of seafaring!

Such a shameful disgrace demands serious repercussions, and the knobs in the control room have come up with a brilliant policy that is guaranteed to put an end to drunken shore-leave shenanigans once and for all...

Ban booze while at sea!

Ya, I don't get the connection either... I guess once you've been to officer training you are privy to a higher level of logic that simply eludes the rest of us.

Entire Canadian Navy in dry-dock after mishap at sea

Both ships of the Royal Canadian Navy were being towed to port yesterday after running into each other.

Navy Lt. Raul Pendergast says initial reports suggest that both Captains may have been texting while driving.

If that is confirmed it would be a violation of Navy rules of conduct. The RCN only permits the use of smart phones while its ships are at anchor or in dry-dock.

One of the most sought after assignments in the Canadian Navy is with the submarine fleet because all four submarines have been dry-docked for the past 14 years. While at one time that fact made the sub fleet something to guarantee death by boredom, the advent of the iPad and smart phone has made it highly desirable.

Swabbies assigned to the Halifax dry-dock where the Canadian sub fleet undergoes a perpetual "refit" report that a typical day consists of eight hours sleep and sixteen hours spent surfing the internet.