First of all, they are talking about building a polar icebreaker, which started at $700,000 or $1 million. It is now well over $1 billion, and it hasn't started to be built yet. To us, spending that huge amount of money on one vessel is.... I know that Canada wants to show sovereignty in the north, but having one ship, to me, doesn't really do the job.
I think that on the commercial side we're needy. We could spend the money better by building more regular icebreakers.
Unfortunately, Canada's shipbuilding policy prevents ships being built overseas, but you could build ships for half the price of building them in Canada.