South Korea put political weight behind its bold, high-stakes bid to sell submarines to Canada on Thursday as Prime Minister Mark Carney got a look at one of the country’s new boats and toured the shipyard that would do the construction.
South Korea Prime Minister Kim Min-seok accompanied Carney during the visit to the Hanwha Ocean Ltd. facility in Geoje, 96 kilometres from Gyeongju, where the Asia Pacific Cooperation (APEC) summit is being held. Earlier in the day, Carney also met with South Korea’s new president, Lee Jae Myung.
Hanwha Ocean and its partner Hyundai Heavy Industries have been fairly aggressive in pitching the KSS-III (Batch 2) submarine to Canada, delivering an unsolicited, detailed proposal to the federal government last winter — just ahead of the last election.
The submarine Carney got to see was only recently launched and built for the South Korean navy. Yet, in a bold marketing move, it flew a Canadian flag from its mast, while a second boat under construction nearby had Korean and Canadian banners draped across it.
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The point of submarines is to sneak up on enemy ships and destroy them. That’s not something Canada has an urgent need to be doing. There are more cost-effective ways to defend the country. But it’s not about being cost-effective, it’s about spending as much money as possible — on building up someone else’s military-industrial complex, since they’re too impatient to build up Canada’s capacity to the point where that kind of hardware could be built here — in order to be able to look “strong” like people are clamouring for.
A sub has more than the single purpose you mentioned. You can’t just hand-wave away their most critical role: intelligence gathering.
If it was about spending as much money as possible we wouldn’t be buying from South Korea as they manufacture vessels faster, and cheaper, than other countries. If we built these at home they’d probably cost 5x as much, we’d get them 10 years late, and they’d be riddled with issues.
I’m trying to see your point. Do you want us to increase our shipbuilding capacity to build these in Canada, or do you not want subs at all?
Do you want the government to give all of this money to our local shipbuilding industry so that they can continue to gouge taxpayers? They can’t even provide our military with the equipment they won bids for without inflating costs and timelines by an exorbitant amount, and that’s not even for subs which are significantly more complicated than something like a supply or patrol ship. At least Davies shipyard was able to provide the CAF with a supply ship within reason, but others, like Irving, are a giant money pit.
It’s a giant money pit either way. Somehow pulling off a miraculous recovery for the Canadian ship-building industry is simply the one thing I can think of that could potentially be used to justify the enormous expense compared to other, better ways of spending that much money. No subs at all sounds fine to me. For intel-gathering purposes of the type so-far mentioned, patrolling around the coastline of Canada watching for the incoming invasion fleet or whatever, there isn’t a whole lot of advantage in trying to do it from a well-armed underwater platform and we’re already spending absurd amounts of money on brand new surface vessels.