Thank you very much.
Many thanks for the opportunity for the Naval Association to appear before you. It's a pleasure, especially in my case since it's my first appearance not at the pleasure of a minister.
I'll deal with the strategic question of what Navy Canada has and will have on our present force, and then turn it over to my colleagues.
The navy responds to and deters other powers in our home waters, working of course with the air force. But all governments have also repeatedly used the navy to respond wherever our national interests are challenged, rather than wait for the challenge to arrive off our coast. Governments have ordered such deployments because supporting the international rules-based order has produced the peace and security on which our trade and prosperity depend. Indeed, such operations abroad have been the core business on which repeated governments have deployed the navy abroad, amounting to dozens of deployments globally for our ships, submarines, aircraft, and task groups over the last 20 years, even while the fleet at home maintained our security.
Yet despite an unbroken record of success on operations at home and abroad, the navy's capabilities and capacities have eroded steadily over the past 20 years, incrementally but increasingly compromising its ability to defend Canada or to act as a force for good abroad. There's been progress recently. The frigates are now well past mid-life, but they've been successfully modernized and our submarines are operational. Further, the national shipbuilding strategy is an important undertaking of considerable promise.
The question isn't whether Canada will successfully build warships; we always have. The question is whether we'll build warships with the capabilities and in the numbers required for the rising challenges. That said, for the Naval Association a regrettable observation is that over the last 20 years a succession of governments and eight parliaments have been unable to sustainably resource defence. The most clear sign of this has been that this G7 nation, with all its maritime interests at home and abroad, has seen its replenishment ships—two of them—and its destroyers—three—age into their mid-forties before being forced out of commission; not merely without relief, not with a gap, but without governments having even entered into contracts to build their replacements.
The navy's success of the last 20 years was due to investments in the fighting fleet that defended Canada made decades before. Here I include submarines, frigates, destroyers, maritime patrol aircraft and, of course, over water CF-18s as well. The youngest of these platforms is now 20 years of age. The oldest is the Athabaskan at 44 years of age. The ability of this government and those that follow to live off these legacy investments is rapidly coming to a close, even as the strategic risks for governments deepen. What are those risks today? Beyond having fewer ships for our defence, we've gapped long-held capabilities.
Canada no longer has the ability to independently control events at sea due to the loss of its task group air defence capability. It no longer has the ability to independently sustain deployed task forces abroad and must rely on others for at-sea refuelling and logistics support, even in our own home waters. Consequently, Canada is unlikely to be able to conduct a prolonged multi-rotation response to international events, nor is it likely to be offered the significant leadership opportunities at sea that such a response enables, particularly in complex operations of the kind we partake in repeatedly, including after 9/11 supporting our American allies for several years in the Middle East.
Looking ahead, on the present course future governments face greater reductions and rising risks. Today's fighting fleet of submarines and surface combatants is already smaller, which research has shown is required to achieve the enduring and bipartisan policy outcomes governments seek, such as maintaining our sovereignty and contributing to international peace and security.
As the parliamentary budget officer and others such as Dave Perry, who I know was here with you in the spring, have noted, the Armed Forces is unsustainable over the coming decade, likely to an amount in the tens of billions of dollars. So plans aimed at restoring the fighting fleets, including those to extend the life of Canada's four highly capable Victoria class submarines into the mid-2030s and then replace them with a new capability, as well as to replace our Aurora maritime patrol aircraft, are not only in jeopardy, they are headed hard aground.
At current budget levels, then, you can anticipate the RCN's fighting flight being further reduced over the coming 15 years, reduced eventually toward a figure—at least a figure in the press—of just nine surface combatants, which would be a 40% cut from the 15 of only two years ago, while the submarines and the air force's maritime patrol aircraft will not likely be affordable and will not likely be replaced, at least not as we currently know them.
Such changes would obviously each compound the risks that I cited earlier by significantly further eroding the maritime capabilities and capacities required to contribute meaningfully to continental and international operations. While for decades the government has often had major warships deployed to two theatres simultaneously, that would no longer be sustainable with a smaller fleet. But, most importantly, such a force would not be suitable or adequate for the vast challenge of defending our three-ocean home waters.
The Naval Association believes that this much smaller and unbalanced future force would consequently not be adequate to national need, especially given the rapid changes under way in the global maritime order: as nations throughout the world, but especially Russia and China, continue to narrow or close technological gaps that western navies have enjoyed for decades, and continue to make significant and disproportionate investments in maritime forces, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region; as great state co-operation continues to give way to competition and confrontation at the expense of the international rules-based order, especially at sea and, most notably, in the South and East China seas; and, finally, as Canada's third and largest, but least accessible and most fragile, ocean space opens to commercial shipping and resource extraction and as the navy and air force secure our sovereignty there.
For the Naval Association, the success of the defence policy review depends on bringing spending levels into balance over the medium to long term with the defence outcomes governments expect. The Naval Association would argue, as I have, that defending Canada in the new strategic environment will require increased investment to achieve what governments expect of the Armed Forces, not less.
In making such investments, the Naval Association would observe that, in addition to securing Canada's defence, there is no better insurance against strategic risk and unforeseen global shocks than a balanced, multi-purpose, and combat-capable maritime force.
The association also believes that this defence policy review represents a moment of strategic opportunity, not just to balance the defence outcomes and resources, but to allow the Armed Forces to be restructured for the challenges of this century. The force structure of the 20th century should be reshaped for the challenges ahead.
Such strategy-driven measures will take vision, commitment, and effort, but the result would be an Armed Forces clearly better prepared to defend Canada.
Thank you very much for your interest. I look forward to any questions you may have.