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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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.