Evidence of meeting #12 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was aircraft.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Ben Lobb Conservative Huron—Bruce, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and welcome to everybody here.
Mr. Fergusson, my first question is for you. I've asked this question a couple of times at committee, around the person-carrying portable air defence systems. In Canada, from anything I've been able to find out, we have virtually zero. We have no ability—and I say this as a Monday morning quarterback—to support Ukraine with any of those, or to defend ourselves.
How is it that we put ourselves in this position? How is it that we did this?
Deputy Director, Centre for Defence and Security Studies, University of Manitoba, As an Individual
It's a combination of several factors. First of all, it's the environment at the time the decision was made to eliminate the limited air defence capabilities of the Canadian Army. This was still prior to the return of great power competition and rivalry that we've seen. There was no air threat to the Canadian Forces in the context of Afghanistan. In Iraq, we were dealing with insurgents. That easily goes by the wayside. There's no problem right now. We don't need it, so why bother? We can rely on allies on a limited basis, because we fight in a coalition. In the context of competition for projects among the forces and within the army, air defence rapidly dropped to the bottom.
With the changing environment now, back to the Russian-Ukrainian war.... Of course, this predates this, because this came out in 2018 and was mentioned in 2017. Now, there's a recognition that the Canadian Forces overseas need air defence. There's still the allied component. The issue of what air defence they need is an open question right now.
Conservative
Ben Lobb Conservative Huron—Bruce, ON
Fair enough.
The last point I would make is that I can find articles about this issue—and you likely read them or wrote them—that go back pretty close to 10 years. It looks to me as if this has never been.... Well, obviously, it hasn't been addressed, because we don't have any.
I'm not criticizing them, but how is it that you have all the military personnel and people at DND liaising with our allies—the U.S. and others—and they don't say, “Guys, you have nothing here. You have to talk to Justin, or you have to talk to Bill Morneau or Chrystia and get some orders in.” How does that work?
Deputy Director, Centre for Defence and Security Studies, University of Manitoba, As an Individual
It's the internal dynamics in a fiscally constrained or capital budget-constrained environment, if we go back. That hasn't gone away. It still exists, lurking beneath the surface. These services.... This starts from the bottom up in terms of priorities, in my view, and in terms of the Canadian Army. This was not going to compete against other requirements they thought much more pressing, including the return to a new generation of main battle tanks. It's a dynamic of intraservice, which then steps into the interservice world, before this is all put together and delivered as a package to government.
Conservative
Ben Lobb Conservative Huron—Bruce, ON
I can go back. I was there in Parliament many years ago. I can remember Michael Ignatieff—that's a long time ago—saying, “You went to buy a Chevy and you came home with a Ferrari.”
From 2010 to 2022, I wonder whether it's dollars—that was the argument at one time—or is it fit, form, functionality or just the fact that it was a sole-sourced contract, way back in the day? At the end of the day, we've ended up with the same machine. What is your analysis of how we got here?
Deputy Director, Centre for Defence and Security Studies, University of Manitoba, As an Individual
Could you clarify? I'm not sure what you mean by “the same machine”. What machine are you talking about?
Deputy Director, Centre for Defence and Security Studies, University of Manitoba, As an Individual
The simple answer is politics. It's political considerations. When political parties decide there is political benefit in politicizing a defence issue because of the large money attached to it—and I understand that incentive—you suddenly get into this problem. We saw it before, going back to the nineties—that lengthy project to replace the Sea King helicopters with the EH101, and the cancellation. The simple answer is political involvement.
It's also reflected, of course, internally, in the context of the professionalization of the bureaucracy. Yes, they are highly professional, but they also play the game of the second guess: What does the government want? If the department feels the F-35, in the process leading up to the election of 2015 and afterwards.... If the government is not likely to look favourably on moving forward quickly, the department won't move forward. They will find other things to push forward. It's the dynamic between government on the one hand, and the perceptions and beliefs in departments on the other hand. When combined, these explain how these things drag on.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Robert Gordon Kitchen
Thank you, Mr. Fergusson.
We'll now to go Mr. Bains for five minutes.
Liberal
Parm Bains Liberal Steveston—Richmond East, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our guests for joining us today.
I want to get into the NSS program—the national shipbuilding strategy—and talk about Vancouver's Seaspan shipyards, which are very important to our marine sector. My questions are coming to you from Richmond, British Columbia.
With the shipyards being commissioned to build two joint support ships—the first is scheduled to be delivered in 2023—can you please outline the function of these ships within the Royal Canadian Navy?
My question is for Mr. Collins.
Adjunct Professor, University of Prince Edward Island, As an Individual
Sure. Thank you, sir.
The JSS are not providing just refuelling capabilities, which give the Royal Canadian Navy the ability to operate on longer distances for a longer period of time and therefore also help to provide a needed allied capability. The ships are also going beyond their predecessor's ability, to essentially provide a medical clinic on them and carry more cargo. It's not the ambitious ship that was initially envisioned back in 2008, which was then cancelled. It has the ability to carry limited troops and helicopters. It has some of the capabilities you would normally associate with an amphibious ship, but at the heart of it, it's about giving the Royal Canadian Navy the ability to operate at sea for extended periods of time and for long durations overseas.
Liberal
Parm Bains Liberal Steveston—Richmond East, BC
Continuing on from there, with its capability, how compatible is it with other technologies that are available with our other allied nations?
Adjunct Professor, University of Prince Edward Island, As an Individual
Well, it has to be interoperable so that it has the ability to do what's known as RAS, refuel at sea, with NATO allies.
Bigger navies would splice up the capabilities that we're trying to put in the JSS into a bunch of different ships. The Brits would have a straightforward ship, like the Tidespring, that can refuel. Then they would have another class of ship, aircraft carriers, for example, that have almost an amphibious-like capability to carry a large number of troops and a large amount of cargo. Australia does, as well. Of course, in Canada, we stopped seeking the big honking ship, as former chief of the defence staff Hillier wanted, over a decade ago, and focused on this particular model.
Liberal
Parm Bains Liberal Steveston—Richmond East, BC
Okay. Sticking with you again, on the fighter jets, when it comes to the security of Canadians, have there been any marked improvements in recent years in terms of aerospace?
Adjunct Professor, University of Prince Edward Island, As an Individual
Are you talking about the air capabilities of the Royal Canadian Air Force, or the industry?
Liberal
Parm Bains Liberal Steveston—Richmond East, BC
In the industry itself, yes. Just broadly, are there any improvements that have been made, in your view?
Adjunct Professor, University of Prince Edward Island, As an Individual
That's a really hard question. As one of Canada's niche areas, and I emphasize “niche”, we have moved away from making military aircraft in large numbers. Since the 1960s, we've stopped doing that. We had the Arrow in the 1950s, and then we gave up licensing in the 1960s. What our air defence industrial base is good at, from an aircraft perspective, are satellites, communications, and really the companies like CAE, for example, that do the training simulation systems. We've developed a really good reputation for niche capabilities like that.
To go back to an earlier question that one of your colleagues asked me about ITBs, one of them is focused on key industrial capabilities, simulation. Those particular specific aerospace niches that we're really good at are what ITBs are trying to boost up and leverage.
Liberal
Parm Bains Liberal Steveston—Richmond East, BC
Sticking to the point, similar to how I asked about the compatibility and capability, with the fighter jets, the F-35s and their weapons systems, what's the compatibility and capability with our NORAD and NATO allies?
Adjunct Professor, University of Prince Edward Island, As an Individual
The vast majority of aircraft that we buy for our military are made by allied manufacturers, principally American manufacturers. As my colleague Mr. Fergusson noted, NORAD interoperability, that binational command continental air defence lens, shapes what goes into designing an aircraft so that they can help fulfill the NORAD mission.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Robert Gordon Kitchen
Thank you, Mr. Bains. Five minutes goes by very quickly.
That ends our first hour on the study of air defence procurement. I appreciate the witnesses. Sometimes there's a little bit of overlap on air and the NSS, so I appreciate your bearing with those questions.
Mr. Fergusson, we thank you for your testimony today. I recognize that you won't be participating in the next hour on the NSS, but you are welcome to stay logged on to the meeting. Although you won't be participating, we appreciate your testimony today.
With that said, we are now going to start our time on the national shipbuilding strategy.
Mr. Collins and Mr. Kasurak, your testimonies that were provided to us have been distributed to the members, so they are aware of them and had them in advance.
We will give up to three minutes if you would like to do a quick intro.
We'll start with Mr. Collins.
Adjunct Professor, University of Prince Edward Island, As an Individual
Thank you, Chair. I'm happy to speak again.
I'll just repeat the key parts of my opening statement. Hopefully, those can serve as the basis for further discussion.
It's worth bearing in mind that the national shipbuilding strategy has no parallel within the history of Canadian defence procurement that has shared its ambition. The goal is to have a continuous, multidecade shipbuilding process.
Right now we're looking at over 50 large ships. There are other components under 1,000 tonnes, small ships, and also refits and modernization. That will mean a huge chunk of dollars down the road, as my colleague Mr. Kasurak noted.
One challenge that's at the heart of why the NSS has had so many problems in terms of start-up and delays and production challenges is that the Government of Canada is essentially attempting to rebuild a capability and industry that, effectively, ended in the 1990s. We're also trying to rebuild lost institutional knowledge within the Department of National Defence, PSPC and the Canadian Armed Forces, which were lost through the cutbacks in the 1990s and 2000s. There's no factory or graduate school out there producing people with a large understanding of Canada's procurement system to build ships, so that knowledge base has to be developed internally.
In ensuing years the challenges that have emerged within the NSS have included primarily project cost estimates, shipyard production gaps, protracted intellectual property negotiations, bid protests by losing bidders, and inadequate communications. Regionalism, of course, is always going to be there. We're no different, in some ways, from our allies like the United Kingdom or Australia, which, interestingly enough, have NSS-like shipbuilding projects. Building a 21st-century navy and coast guard is a complicated business, and geopolitical challenges, like those echoed earlier for the air defence side of things, apply equally to Canada's maritime interests.
One key gap that I hope will get clarified going forward is what the future of the submarine force will be. It's due to be replaced next decade. I'm hoping we get some answers.
I look forward to your questions.
Conservative
Fellow, Centre for International and Defence Policy, Queen's University, As an Individual
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Rather than reading my statement, which Mr. Collins has pre-empted with an excellent summary of where we are, I'd just like to mention the two problems that I pointed out in it.
One is that with the length of time now, due to continuing delays and to the basic strategy of trying to stretch out delivery in order to have an ongoing, long-standing defence industry, we're going to start cutting steel for the CSC at a time when the newest patrol frigates will be close to 50 years old. By the time the fleet of 15 frigates is actually delivered, it will be 2045. I think this is going to be a considerable problem to manage, both in terms of naval capability and just in terms of configuration control of what's being built.
Then, finally, there's the question of cost. Right now, there's really no good way to estimate what these ships are going to cost. The Parliamentary Budget Officer, of course, says about $77 billion, but the former director general of the DND program has gone on record as saying we can't really estimate the cost of building these ships until we've built at least three of them. Cost is up in the air.
The defence program as a whole, as the Parliamentary Budget Officer has recently pointed out, is shifting capital procurement to the right in a rather severe way. I think that a huge budget crunch is coming, which is going to be very difficult to manage, and that there will be a capacity problem when DND tries to process all these projects in more or less the same time.
I think those two problems are key: the length of time it's going to take to deliver the fleet and the mounting costs that will have to somehow be managed inside the defence program.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Robert Gordon Kitchen
Thank you, Mr. Kasurak.
Now we'll go into questions. We will start with Mr. Paul-Hus for six minutes.