Buying new coastal ferries from a hostile government, that will use no Canadian steel, aluminum or skilled workers, is a decision the premier is probably already regretting.
Definitely not a good look for the NDP, pretty hypocritical for sure.
Not a fan of the protectionist rectoric coming from the critics though. If Canada had a flourishing shipbuilding industry then sure it'd be worth paying a modest premium for a Canadian made ship but quite frankly we don't. We'd have to spend probably 10s of billions of dollars and another decade to get there, if I were a taxpayer in BC I'd be pretty pissed about wasting all that money in that scenario, plus I assume BC ferries is buying the ships because it needs them and probably can't afford to wait another 15 years for a new ship.
Maybe a middle ground would be buying the ships from South Korea.
In the decades after the Second World War, Canada funded capital investment in shipyards and ensured a steady supply of ship orders to keep them busy. Maintaining the domestic manufacturing and technical capacity is far more important than getting the best possible price per ship. Taxpayer dollars spent at home become tax revenue. Taxpayer dollars spent overseas become domestic debt.
COVID should have been the wake up call that the global trade status quo cannot hold. We can't keep neglecting our own productive capacity and funding our adversaries with IOUs. It's insane that Canada, with its huge coastline and vast supply of iron and technical expertise, does not have a world-leading shipbuilding industry.
"Maintaining the domestic manufacturing and technical capacity is far more important than getting the best possible price per ship." The BC Ferries experience in the '90s and early 2000s suggest not only were they not getting a good price (multiples of the foreign yards they bought from), they weren't even getting a good product or maintaining any significant technical capacity. The Spirit class vessels built in BC were way over budget, and reflected pretty old tech. The Fast Cat ferries were an unmitigated disaster - badly designed, over budget, and the yard was plagued with problems trying to adopt aluminum construction - something that foreign shipyards had done for decades. You're imagining an idealized end state that experience has shown isn't what's going to happen.
Buying passenger ferries from Poland, Germany, or even South Korea hardly counts as buying ships from adversaries. 2 of the 3 are NATO allies, and we've got free trade agreements with all 3. You can make more of a case for building military vessels in Canada, but even then, the complexity of modern weapons systems suggests a more rational approach is to share the burden with allies and focus on a domestic capacity to sustain them.
That's why maintaining production capacity and making capital investments is super important. No shipbuilder will invest in new technology or techniques without orders. A ferry order every 20 years isn't enough. If Canada's shipbuilders only deal in occasional military orders, the ships will of course be bloated and expensive and slow to build.
This isn't an imagined idealized state; this is what Canada did in the past. This is how Britain, the USA, Korea, and China became shipbuilding superpowers. Use every lever of government to buy lots of ships. Structure the market to ensure a healthy level of private commercial shipbuilding. Provide cheap capital to stay current with technology.
Or just keep doing what we've done for the past 40 years and watch our productive capacity wither.
Britain and the USA are no longer shipbuilding superpowers. I was involved in a ferry project with Ferguson, the last shipyard in Glasgow, Scotland. It went bankrupt before the project completed, the end of the industry that once dominated Glasgow and built a significant fraction of the world’s shipping. The cause of death was ultimately labor costs, just as it is in the US. Yes, they still build military ships, but that’s the exception.
You need the volume to sustain a commercial business, and Canadian demand isn’t going to come close to what you need for non-military vessels. On top of that, it’s damned hard to compete with yards located close to all of the specialized suppliers of marine equipment and components needed to kit out those ships. It’s not impossible for a high income country to compete, but it’s also really hard to catch up to the Netherlands, Norway, or Finland when they’ve been running hard for decades.
US and Britain are great examples of shipbuilding prowess that was left to wilt by shortsighted and naive governments- just like us. If you don't use it, you lose it.
Canada used to have lots of shipping demand and an innovative shipbuilding industry until the government stopped supporting it in the 80's. China and Korea poured lots of money into shipbuilding and have created highly efficient and innovative shipyards and supply chains. State of the art shipyards don't just spontaneously sprout out of the ground. They require steady policy support from governments. History shows that this is the way.
Sounds like a classic political "own goal". Also another example of our failure to invest in ourselves over the past several decades. No, we can't build ships at China's cost. Maybe there are actually higher priorities we should be looking at.
“Elbows up” was always cringe-worthy. Now we know it was empty claptrap, too.
But then, who am I to point fingers? I still buy California wine and our new kitchen faucet came from China. Revealed preferences are powerful observations.
Don’t worry, Premier Eby. It’ll all blow over. Politicians meddling in business decisions of supposedly arm’s length Crown corporations is another thing wrong with Canada. This decision by BC Ferries has obviously been years in the making. You can’t just suddenly cancel the contract and start from scratch. Just like there was no way Canada was ever going to cancel the F-35 jet contract just because Trump.
No, they'll take the first 16 that we're committed to.....But I'd be quite content if there weren't a follow-up order. Sadly, the US is no longer a reliable ally. So why buy billions worth of jets that they maintain effective control over?
And Canada has been a reliable ally? To whom? Based upon all the "allies" rallying to our cause the answer is apparent.
I cannot foresee a scenario where the CAF will act independently of the US outside our borders, and we cannot disconnect the country from the US border and float it overseas. Even if we could, who would be a more dependable ally?
We've been impeccable. The only mission we rejected was W's lie-based invasion of Iraq, and that was the correct decision. But when asked, we've done the best we could with what we had.
That doesn't change that we've had 30 years of governments that didn't care about the military. Maybe, finally, we have a government that understands that needs to change and fast.
I also agree with your assessment that we won't be doing anything without the US. Which is why we don't need the F35. We don't need stealth. The US is going to establish air superiority very quickly. We will be part of what follows.
I realise that the military gives out participation medals, but we are Eddie the Eagle, regardless of fault. An embarrassment or virtuous? If the allies had to pick who joined them in conflict, where on the list would we sit?
As you point out, our military can't be held responsible. I believe the last substantial procurement was in the '80s (the non-immersible submarines don't count), so 40 years ago ? We are destined to play second fiddle and should ask the conductor what they need from us for success. If that is F35s, then that's the tune we play. At least for now.
We're 40 million people supporting the second-largest country on the planet. A supporting role is logical. We are not going to be what we were in WW2 again. Any war we fight on our soil will involve the US.
Leslie, you say in part, "... Politicians med...dling in business decisions of supposedly arm’s length Crown corporations is another thing wrong with Canada...."
Correct; BUT. Politicians intervening in operating decisions is one (odious) thing; politicians setting out in advance some principles (e.g. don't by from China; buy locally where possible; buy from allies where local is not possible) is entirely defensible and then requiring Crowns to follow those principles is, again, entirely defensible.
CACO, Canada always chickens out. Trump and TACO isn't the only one who has a bigger bark than bite.
Anyone under the age of 45 who has lived in Canada for most of their life knows Canadian's will say the right thing in the moment but words are ultimately cheap.
One Canadian market isn't happening. Unity isn't happening. Pipelines across Canada isn't happening. Plan accordingly.
Having lived in Canada for almost 40 years and being a Canadian citizen for over 30, I must regrettably say that the only consistent Canadian value is hypocrisy.
Western shipbuilding is, pardon the metaphor, a ship that's sailed and sailed long ago. It is largely restricted to naval warships and niche markets such as cruise ships and so forth. Basic shipbuilding in now in the Far East - Japan, Korea, and China.
Creating our own shipbuilding expertise comes at enormous cost and usually to no useful end. We created the Saint John Shipbuilding firm, along with a partner at Davie, that promptly went bankrupt owing to the dearth of orders from the RCN in the 1980s and 1990s. We let the investment wither and now we're in the midst of repeating the process. Our market is too small to thrive and foreign competition is, alas, too competitive. They possess decades of investment that will take decades of investment to create and I sense we lack the capital and management expertise to succeed.
So, BC Ferries went the logical route.
It is, however, symbolic of the intertwined economic system that prevails in today's world. We all benefit from comparative trade advantages and reduced tariffs. I understand as well as anyone the American effort to destroy this system for reasons that beggar belief but it is what it is. Canada benefited as well as anywhere with this system but now we're going to have recalibrate relationships globally, often with uncomfortable partners - but we already have to deal with an uncomfortable partner down south. It is the new reality. See the PM's guest list to this week's G7 conference.
Last comment - many of the irruptions over Chinese slave labour are not quite right. Their wages and standards are lower than ours, hence they can deliver ships cheaper. However, the cultural genocide of the Uighurs, a well attested crime, is far inland and has nothing to do with shipbuilding. I somehow doubt that we're going to completely cut off China from all commercial and diplomatic relations over this issue (we haven't and we won't). We're in the middle of a bout of real politik that will stress all of us but needs must. Our national self interest is evolving and it is by no means set or understood yet by the practitioners let alone the body politic.
The new ferry (s?) will probably run fine. Chinese navy vessels seem to be strong enough to deliberately ram Filipino navy vessels (with “60 Minutes” US journalists on board) in the South China Sea and not sink.
For me, I think all ocean vessels, ferries included, are powerful symbols of progress and certainly "elbows up". But, we gotta buy off the shelf (not @#$%% used stuff!) because there isn't a chance in hell government is going to solve a godawful procurement process that is welded good and tight to electoral fortunes in specific ridings. Very specific ridings.
Try living on an Island with no other way to get to the mainland than on a ferry. These ferries are our highways. We are constantly being held hostage because of the ferry system. I’m a senior citizen who hasn’t ventured off Vancouver Island for so many years that I’ve Lost track of the last time I touched the rest of Canada. Every time I sneeze, the cost of BC Ferries goes up. Maybe David Eby is just being realistic. Maybe expecting coastal community citizens to wait God knows how many years to establish a shipbuilding industry is unrealistic. Maybe doing deals with foreign agents, whether they are Chinese or American, is the only realistic choice he has at this moment in time.
Eby is so distracted by his need (for relevance, popularity, power) that he can't make a coherent decision. He doesn't seem to have any more of a plan than DT... who is also utterly distracted by his deep seated needs, lol.
Premier Eby is still Captain Canada. He will be vindicated by history once Canada officially becomes the 27th Province of China. And China is closer to BC by sea than Quebec’s Davie shipbuilding - which is owned by Inocea group (a consortium of private European investors and US financial institutions).
Useful info, thanks. Did not know. Good sarcasm - I will add.
Soooo..... why did not the friggin' Canadians invest their own friggin' money into that Davie shipbuilding, haaa ?? 'Cuz Canadian gov taxes citizenry to into oblivion so citizenry have no money to invest into their own country ? 'Cuz Carbon Taxes "uber alles" (they are still here !!), more important than anything else, so citizens have no spare dime to invest locally ??
Definitely not a good look for the NDP, pretty hypocritical for sure.
Not a fan of the protectionist rectoric coming from the critics though. If Canada had a flourishing shipbuilding industry then sure it'd be worth paying a modest premium for a Canadian made ship but quite frankly we don't. We'd have to spend probably 10s of billions of dollars and another decade to get there, if I were a taxpayer in BC I'd be pretty pissed about wasting all that money in that scenario, plus I assume BC ferries is buying the ships because it needs them and probably can't afford to wait another 15 years for a new ship.
Maybe a middle ground would be buying the ships from South Korea.
Do you not think that the likes of South Korea, China and others have not laid out hundreds-of-billions over many years to build their industries?
Yet we cannot come up with a strategy that is NOT informed by late 20th Century ideas about how trade and investment ought to work.
China is not our friend (at least not under the current regime).
Maybe if we cut the HST on new ships, that will spur a shipbuilding boom.
In the decades after the Second World War, Canada funded capital investment in shipyards and ensured a steady supply of ship orders to keep them busy. Maintaining the domestic manufacturing and technical capacity is far more important than getting the best possible price per ship. Taxpayer dollars spent at home become tax revenue. Taxpayer dollars spent overseas become domestic debt.
COVID should have been the wake up call that the global trade status quo cannot hold. We can't keep neglecting our own productive capacity and funding our adversaries with IOUs. It's insane that Canada, with its huge coastline and vast supply of iron and technical expertise, does not have a world-leading shipbuilding industry.
"Maintaining the domestic manufacturing and technical capacity is far more important than getting the best possible price per ship." The BC Ferries experience in the '90s and early 2000s suggest not only were they not getting a good price (multiples of the foreign yards they bought from), they weren't even getting a good product or maintaining any significant technical capacity. The Spirit class vessels built in BC were way over budget, and reflected pretty old tech. The Fast Cat ferries were an unmitigated disaster - badly designed, over budget, and the yard was plagued with problems trying to adopt aluminum construction - something that foreign shipyards had done for decades. You're imagining an idealized end state that experience has shown isn't what's going to happen.
Buying passenger ferries from Poland, Germany, or even South Korea hardly counts as buying ships from adversaries. 2 of the 3 are NATO allies, and we've got free trade agreements with all 3. You can make more of a case for building military vessels in Canada, but even then, the complexity of modern weapons systems suggests a more rational approach is to share the burden with allies and focus on a domestic capacity to sustain them.
That's why maintaining production capacity and making capital investments is super important. No shipbuilder will invest in new technology or techniques without orders. A ferry order every 20 years isn't enough. If Canada's shipbuilders only deal in occasional military orders, the ships will of course be bloated and expensive and slow to build.
This isn't an imagined idealized state; this is what Canada did in the past. This is how Britain, the USA, Korea, and China became shipbuilding superpowers. Use every lever of government to buy lots of ships. Structure the market to ensure a healthy level of private commercial shipbuilding. Provide cheap capital to stay current with technology.
Or just keep doing what we've done for the past 40 years and watch our productive capacity wither.
Britain and the USA are no longer shipbuilding superpowers. I was involved in a ferry project with Ferguson, the last shipyard in Glasgow, Scotland. It went bankrupt before the project completed, the end of the industry that once dominated Glasgow and built a significant fraction of the world’s shipping. The cause of death was ultimately labor costs, just as it is in the US. Yes, they still build military ships, but that’s the exception.
You need the volume to sustain a commercial business, and Canadian demand isn’t going to come close to what you need for non-military vessels. On top of that, it’s damned hard to compete with yards located close to all of the specialized suppliers of marine equipment and components needed to kit out those ships. It’s not impossible for a high income country to compete, but it’s also really hard to catch up to the Netherlands, Norway, or Finland when they’ve been running hard for decades.
US and Britain are great examples of shipbuilding prowess that was left to wilt by shortsighted and naive governments- just like us. If you don't use it, you lose it.
Canada used to have lots of shipping demand and an innovative shipbuilding industry until the government stopped supporting it in the 80's. China and Korea poured lots of money into shipbuilding and have created highly efficient and innovative shipyards and supply chains. State of the art shipyards don't just spontaneously sprout out of the ground. They require steady policy support from governments. History shows that this is the way.
Sounds like a classic political "own goal". Also another example of our failure to invest in ourselves over the past several decades. No, we can't build ships at China's cost. Maybe there are actually higher priorities we should be looking at.
Guess not, though.
“Elbows up” was always cringe-worthy. Now we know it was empty claptrap, too.
But then, who am I to point fingers? I still buy California wine and our new kitchen faucet came from China. Revealed preferences are powerful observations.
Don’t worry, Premier Eby. It’ll all blow over. Politicians meddling in business decisions of supposedly arm’s length Crown corporations is another thing wrong with Canada. This decision by BC Ferries has obviously been years in the making. You can’t just suddenly cancel the contract and start from scratch. Just like there was no way Canada was ever going to cancel the F-35 jet contract just because Trump.
No, they'll take the first 16 that we're committed to.....But I'd be quite content if there weren't a follow-up order. Sadly, the US is no longer a reliable ally. So why buy billions worth of jets that they maintain effective control over?
And Canada has been a reliable ally? To whom? Based upon all the "allies" rallying to our cause the answer is apparent.
I cannot foresee a scenario where the CAF will act independently of the US outside our borders, and we cannot disconnect the country from the US border and float it overseas. Even if we could, who would be a more dependable ally?
We've been impeccable. The only mission we rejected was W's lie-based invasion of Iraq, and that was the correct decision. But when asked, we've done the best we could with what we had.
That doesn't change that we've had 30 years of governments that didn't care about the military. Maybe, finally, we have a government that understands that needs to change and fast.
I also agree with your assessment that we won't be doing anything without the US. Which is why we don't need the F35. We don't need stealth. The US is going to establish air superiority very quickly. We will be part of what follows.
I realise that the military gives out participation medals, but we are Eddie the Eagle, regardless of fault. An embarrassment or virtuous? If the allies had to pick who joined them in conflict, where on the list would we sit?
As you point out, our military can't be held responsible. I believe the last substantial procurement was in the '80s (the non-immersible submarines don't count), so 40 years ago ? We are destined to play second fiddle and should ask the conductor what they need from us for success. If that is F35s, then that's the tune we play. At least for now.
We're 40 million people supporting the second-largest country on the planet. A supporting role is logical. We are not going to be what we were in WW2 again. Any war we fight on our soil will involve the US.
Leslie, you say in part, "... Politicians med...dling in business decisions of supposedly arm’s length Crown corporations is another thing wrong with Canada...."
Correct; BUT. Politicians intervening in operating decisions is one (odious) thing; politicians setting out in advance some principles (e.g. don't by from China; buy locally where possible; buy from allies where local is not possible) is entirely defensible and then requiring Crowns to follow those principles is, again, entirely defensible.
CACO, Canada always chickens out. Trump and TACO isn't the only one who has a bigger bark than bite.
Anyone under the age of 45 who has lived in Canada for most of their life knows Canadian's will say the right thing in the moment but words are ultimately cheap.
One Canadian market isn't happening. Unity isn't happening. Pipelines across Canada isn't happening. Plan accordingly.
Having lived in Canada for almost 40 years and being a Canadian citizen for over 30, I must regrettably say that the only consistent Canadian value is hypocrisy.
It's hard to be consistently polite without a healthy tolerance for hypocrisy.
Re the Eby Ferry Fiasco. The only thing I can say about this is “You Can’t Fix Stupid”.
Western shipbuilding is, pardon the metaphor, a ship that's sailed and sailed long ago. It is largely restricted to naval warships and niche markets such as cruise ships and so forth. Basic shipbuilding in now in the Far East - Japan, Korea, and China.
Creating our own shipbuilding expertise comes at enormous cost and usually to no useful end. We created the Saint John Shipbuilding firm, along with a partner at Davie, that promptly went bankrupt owing to the dearth of orders from the RCN in the 1980s and 1990s. We let the investment wither and now we're in the midst of repeating the process. Our market is too small to thrive and foreign competition is, alas, too competitive. They possess decades of investment that will take decades of investment to create and I sense we lack the capital and management expertise to succeed.
So, BC Ferries went the logical route.
It is, however, symbolic of the intertwined economic system that prevails in today's world. We all benefit from comparative trade advantages and reduced tariffs. I understand as well as anyone the American effort to destroy this system for reasons that beggar belief but it is what it is. Canada benefited as well as anywhere with this system but now we're going to have recalibrate relationships globally, often with uncomfortable partners - but we already have to deal with an uncomfortable partner down south. It is the new reality. See the PM's guest list to this week's G7 conference.
Last comment - many of the irruptions over Chinese slave labour are not quite right. Their wages and standards are lower than ours, hence they can deliver ships cheaper. However, the cultural genocide of the Uighurs, a well attested crime, is far inland and has nothing to do with shipbuilding. I somehow doubt that we're going to completely cut off China from all commercial and diplomatic relations over this issue (we haven't and we won't). We're in the middle of a bout of real politik that will stress all of us but needs must. Our national self interest is evolving and it is by no means set or understood yet by the practitioners let alone the body politic.
I think British Columbia is Canada's sickest province, sicker than those out East.
Praise the Lord. Maybe we’ll get a new ferry. If you lived in a coastal community you probably wouldn’t care where it came from as long as it runs.
The new ferry (s?) will probably run fine. Chinese navy vessels seem to be strong enough to deliberately ram Filipino navy vessels (with “60 Minutes” US journalists on board) in the South China Sea and not sink.
I live in a coastal community and absolutely do care.
For me, I think all ocean vessels, ferries included, are powerful symbols of progress and certainly "elbows up". But, we gotta buy off the shelf (not @#$%% used stuff!) because there isn't a chance in hell government is going to solve a godawful procurement process that is welded good and tight to electoral fortunes in specific ridings. Very specific ridings.
Try living on an Island with no other way to get to the mainland than on a ferry. These ferries are our highways. We are constantly being held hostage because of the ferry system. I’m a senior citizen who hasn’t ventured off Vancouver Island for so many years that I’ve Lost track of the last time I touched the rest of Canada. Every time I sneeze, the cost of BC Ferries goes up. Maybe David Eby is just being realistic. Maybe expecting coastal community citizens to wait God knows how many years to establish a shipbuilding industry is unrealistic. Maybe doing deals with foreign agents, whether they are Chinese or American, is the only realistic choice he has at this moment in time.
It’s very easy to get to and from
The mainland from Vancouver island . I am a bit confused why you would paint a picture that you are stuck there
Eby is so distracted by his need (for relevance, popularity, power) that he can't make a coherent decision. He doesn't seem to have any more of a plan than DT... who is also utterly distracted by his deep seated needs, lol.
Gonna need more popcorn...
Premier Eby is still Captain Canada. He will be vindicated by history once Canada officially becomes the 27th Province of China. And China is closer to BC by sea than Quebec’s Davie shipbuilding - which is owned by Inocea group (a consortium of private European investors and US financial institutions).
Useful info, thanks. Did not know. Good sarcasm - I will add.
Soooo..... why did not the friggin' Canadians invest their own friggin' money into that Davie shipbuilding, haaa ?? 'Cuz Canadian gov taxes citizenry to into oblivion so citizenry have no money to invest into their own country ? 'Cuz Carbon Taxes "uber alles" (they are still here !!), more important than anything else, so citizens have no spare dime to invest locally ??
That is the bigger picture - Canada's own fault.
Pretty questionable by either BC Ferries and/or the provincial government.
I hope Eby and his government are roasted for this. The contract should be cancelled.
“Eby has not commented on the decision publicly. It seems to go against everything his government has ever said, or professed to stand for.”
Logical consistency has never been Lotus Land's strong point. It's not even in the top hundred of the province's main attractions.
Who knew that it would be ferries that did it again ...