Carney is sacrificing Canadian shipyard workers to a forty-billion-dollar submarine procurement built for alliance politics.
The Canadian Patrol Submarine Project, valued at up to $39.3 billion by industry estimates, will replace the country’s four Victoria-class boats — maintained at CFB Esquimalt in British Columbia and built to a design purchased from the Royal Navy in 1998 — with as many as twelve new conventionally powered submarines. Prime Minister Mark Carney is scheduled to attend the NATO summit in Ankara beginning Monday, and a decision on the contract is expected in the same news cycle. Two bidders remain: South Korea’s Hanwha Ocean, offering a 3,000-ton KSS-III design that uses fuel-cell air-independent propulsion (engines that can run without surfacing for air) and lithium-ion batteries to remain submerged for more than three weeks, with first delivery promised by 2032; and Germany’s TKMS, backed by a government-level push that sent Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil to the company’s facilities last week. Either outcome sends the work overseas. And the tradesmen at Esquimalt who have kept the Victoria-class running for twenty-five years, the shipyard workers in Halifax and Lévis who have the skills to build next-generation boats, and the taxpayers writing the check are about to find out what that means.
This is being sold as a defense story and it is not a defense story. It is a forty-billion-dollar industrial contract dressed up as one. The real question — what does Canada need under the sea given the documented Russian submarine activity on the northern flank, the aging of the current fleet, the Arctic and North Atlantic security environment — is the question that ought to be driving a thirty-nine-billion-dollar decision. It is not the question that is driving this one. The question that is driving this one is which allied government gets the work, and the people paying the price for that question are the men and women whose livelihoods depend on Canadian shipbuilding.
If Hanwha Ocean wins, the work flows to a South Korean shipyard, and the Canadian submarine-industrial workforce — the marine engineer at Esquimalt who has spent twenty years on the Victories, the welders in Halifax whose yard is searching for its next major new-build contract, the steelworkers and machinists in Lévis — loses a generation of work. If TKMS wins, the work stays in Germany, and the same Canadian workforce waits. The towns that depend on those yards, the local economies that turn on those paychecks, the supply chains of small firms that machine parts and cast fittings for the naval base — they are the ones who pay for a decision being timed to a NATO summit. The Victoria-class boats retire in the mid-2030s. That timeline should be driving the procurement. Instead, the timeline is being driven by a political calendar.
Here is how the loop works at the worker’s end. Canadian taxpayers fund a forty-billion-dollar procurement. The money flows to a foreign shipyard, here or there. The Canadian tradesmen who could have built the boats go back to whatever work they can find, and some of them age out of the workforce before a replacement program ever comes along. Canada builds no new submarine-industrial capacity. The maintenance contract that follows the build — the decades of overhaul, repair, and sustainment that are worth as much as the construction itself — either goes overseas too or comes back to Esquimalt stripped of the intellectual-property access needed to sustain the fleet without the builder’s permission. The workers who paid for the boats through their taxes lose the jobs that the procurement should have created, and the readiness of the fleet in 2040 depends on whether Ottawa’s political relationship with Seoul or Berlin is still good. That is the loop. The workers pay twice: once in the jobs they lose now, and once in the readiness they lose later.
What would a thirty-nine-billion-dollar decision look like if Canadian workers were the main product? It would look like a phased build with Canadian industrial participation on the maintenance side from day one, not as a promise for later. It would look like an intellectual-property package that lets Canada sustain and upgrade the boats on its own if the political relationship with whoever built them sours. It would look like a timeline driven by when the Victories retire, not by the news cycle around a NATO summit. It would not look like a single bid decision announced to maximize a photo opportunity.
Canadians should read Carney’s decision, whichever way it lands, as the answer to the question the procurement was actually asking. If Hanwha wins, the work goes to Seoul and the shipyard workers at home lose. If TKMS wins, the work goes to Berlin and the shipyard workers at home wait. Either way, the answer is not about the submarines. The receipt is forty billion dollars and a workforce told to wait.