The NSS

One of the few things the Cons ever did that I agreed with was the initiation of the National Shipbuilding Strategy or NSS.  In a nutshell Canada in the 1990s declared it would buy all naval vessels from other nations, but lacked the fortitude to actually do so. ("Think of the optics of spending billions overseas!!") Meanwhile the Navy was allowed to decline, with every ship class save the reserve Kingston class and the Halifax class frigates allowed to degrade until their condition forced their retirement. The NSS is an attempt to regenerate Canada's completely decayed Naval shipbuilding capacity, and put it on a sustainable, long term footing. I thought it was a good idea. Canada in the way it spends its defense dollars is in essence a naval nation, and if we're going to spend extra money for defense capacity, it makes sense to spend it on shipyards. Despite being a major nation in aerospace, we are rather unique in that we don't heavily subsidize a defense sector in it; frankly most industrialized nations do this, and are happy, even desperate, to sell aircraft to offset that cost. Thanks to the large Canadian automotive sector, we also build some military vehicles - witness those APCs Canada is building for Saudi Arabia.

At the same time, if anybody saw this as a classic Canadian boondoggle and felt both cynical and foreboding about the program, I couldn't blame them. After all, that's an intelligent reaction. The only procurement programs Canada seemingly cannot screw up are those programs where normal Canadian bureaucracy is bypassed.

It is a complex, ongoing program, and the early signs have been - mostly - positive. The nearer term goal of producing supply ships for the Canadian Navy (which the Canadian navy has to right now rent from Spain and Chile.) These ships are desperately needed, as Canada without them has no ability to operate away from Canada without them.

Anyway, if you want to read more about it, Canadian Naval Review has an entire issue dedicated to it, which you can read here. As the articles in it are mostly written by academics and policy wonks, it has a lot of good information in it. Of course, 'Canadian Naval Review' is funded partially though Canadian Government money, and so a party apparatchik was found to give the Government's official view. Most of it is alright, though one paragraph in it made me laugh aloud. The author, Tom Ring, briefly addresses why some ships could not be bought overseas.* The paragraph will no doubt be incorporated into a future LSAT:

"Some people argue that it would be cheaper and faster to build offshore. This assertion may or may not be correct, but unfortunately it cannot be either proven or disproven. The challenge of the build-in-Canada approach is to do so in a manner that respects value for money while ensuring that the billions of dollars of economic benefits remain in Canada. Unfortunately, it is simply not possible to seek quotes from offshore builders for vessels that have yet to be designed, or at least not without incurring high risk premiums and questionable price quotations. Thus while in theory and/or practice, there may be lower labour costs in foreign shipyards, how this would affect the final price for vessels cannot be stated with certainty, given that labour costs typically represent approximately 30-35% of the cost of building complex vessels."


23. What is the main error in reasoning in the above paragraph?

A. that statements about the world can only be taken seriously if they have a falsification condition;

B. that Canada must build vessels yet undesigned, as opposed to buying 'off the shelf';

C. that Canada's current shipbuilding program does not involve high risk premiums or questionable price quotations;

D. that the lower labor costs in foreign shipyards is the only savings involved in buying overseas;

E. that the final price for a vessel must be stated with certainty in order for Canada to agree to its construction;

F. that foreign shipyards are incapable of reaching Canada's exotic requirements for naval vessels? 

*This is an increasingly relevant question, as the NSS envisioned replacing Canada's now entirely scrapped destroyer force of four and the ten Halifax class frigates with a new class of "15 Frigates but better." Early returns show that the Conservative government wildly underestimated the cost of the new ships, and so the number of new frigates actually has declined beneath the replacement numbers of just the Halifax class. In a scary Trump and Putin filled world, there's increasingly a case for us to speed up our naval reconstruction by, say, buying destroyers from the South Koreans, who produce the American Arleigh Burke class, but improved for extra durability and longevity. Canada has been obsessing over being an 'international actor' and arctic sovereignty. Well, there is no substitute for actual capacity, as opposed to theoretical capacity.