BY JAMES CARELESS

Building Canada’s Next Generation Naval Vessel

Replacing the Royal Canadian Navy’s Kingston-class Maritime Coastal Defence Vessels (MCDVs) with the Vigilance Next Generation Naval Vessel (Vigilance NGNVs) proposed by Team Vigilance will require a fully-equipped domestic shipyard with sufficient depth and resources to do the job. Since Davie Shipbuilding, Irving Shipbuilding, and Seaspan have their hands full working on other vessels under the National Shipbuilding Strategy (NSS), it makes sense for Team Vigilance to use a different yet trusted domestic contractor for the job — namely Team Vigilance founding partner, Ontario Shipyards.

            Headquartered in Hamilton, Ontario with additional shipyards in Port Weller, Ontario and Thunder Bay, Ontario, the company formerly known as Heddle Shipyards was founded in 1987 by Rick Heddle with nothing more than a welding machine. Subsequently renamed to highlight its province-wide footprint, Ontario Shipyards has grown into the largest Canadian-owned ship repair and construction business on the Great Lakes. The company offers a full range of design, manufacturing, maintenance, and repair facilities for large-scale ships. And although Ontario Shipyards’ main focus is on the Great Lakes commercial fleet, “we’re currently executing the vessel life extension of the CCGS icebreaker Terry Fox, which is the largest vessel life extension ever undertaken by the Canadian Coast Guard,” said Ted Kirkpatrick, the company’s Director of Business Development and Government Relations.

VESSEL LIFE EXTENSION

            Ontario Shipyards won the $135.56 million vessel life extension contract after an open competitive bidding process. According to a November 2, 2022 Government of Canada news release, “the vessel life extension contract includes two phases: a 14-month engineering and procurement phase which will prepare the shipyard for the second phase, the 18 month work period where the vessel will be drydocked for the vessel life extension project.”

            The fact that Ontario Shipyards won this contract — which is an equivalent scale of work as the jobs being executed by Davie Shipbuilding, Irving Shipbuilding, and Seaspan under the NSS — speaks to this company’s ability to handle a project as large as the proposed Vigilance NGNVs. “We know that we have what is needed to fulfill Pillar Two of the NSS, which is to replace the Kingston-class ships,” said Kirkpatrick.

            This view is endorsed by Derek Buxton, Vard Marine’s (VARD) Vice President of Business Development. (VARD is another founding member of Team Vigilance, and the designer of the Vigilance NGNV.) “For an undertaking of this magnitude, we wanted to make the process of building these ships as easy and as seamless as possible,” Buxton told CDR. “This is why Ontario Shipyards is the right contractor for the job, because they have the footprint, the facilities, the infrastructure, and the skilled people to do it here in Canada.”

ONTARIO SHIPYARDS’ HISTORY

            Shipyards in Ontario have a long history of building vessels for the RCN. “Our Thunder Bay facility built RCN ships during both World Wars,” said Kirkpatrick. “A lot of the Corvettes that were used during WW2 by the RCN and the Royal Navy were built here as well. More recently, our drydocks in Port Weller took part in the mid-life refits of the Halifax-class frigates, in addition to having built more than 80 government and commercial vessels during its time — including CCGS Des Groseilliers and other Coast Guard vessels as well as MTO ferries and similar ships.”

            This historical legacy explains why Ontario is the right province to ‘pick up the slack’ for building the Kingston-class replacement ships. Add the fact that Ontario Shipyards is the largest contractor of its kind in the province, and it only makes sense to build the Vigilance NGNVs at its facilities.

            “Fulfilling projects such as the Canadian Surface Combatant and other aspects of the NSS, along with scheduled maintenance on the NSS ships already in service, is eating into the capabilities of Davie Shipbuilding, Irving Shipbuilding, and Seaspan to do additional work,” Kirkpatrick told CDR. “Since one of the key points of the NSS is to revitalize Canada’s sovereign shipbuilding capacity, it only makes sense to assign the Kingston-class replacement work to Ontario Shipyards. After all, our facilities are currently underutilised, so we have the ability to take on this work in a timely and efficient manner.”

OPEN FOR BUSINESS

            Tapping Ontario for Pillar Two NSS work, when major NSS projects are already being executed by shipyards in BC, Nova Scotia, and Quebec, is also a smart way to reduce risk by spreading out the work. “As such, bringing Ontario into the NSS fold makes sense from a government/national security perspective,” Kirkpatrick said. “It is also logical from an economic perspective, because unlike the Big Three Shipyards currently working on the NSS, we’re not solely reliant on government work for our existence. We’re fundamentally a commercial shipyard who does a lot of work for the Canadian commercial fleet. In fact, by taking over the Port Weller and Thunder Bay shipbuilding facilities, Ontario Shipyards has been able to repatriate Canadian shipbuilding contracts that had gone south to the United States.”

            This is why assigning the Kingston-class replacement contract to Team Vigilance makes plain good sense for Canada. “Ontario Shipyards is all about restoring our country’s sovereign capacity in the commercial shipbuilding space,” said Kirkpatrick. “Building the Vigilance NGNVs in our yards will reinforce that sovereign commercial capacity, as well as Canada’s sovereign capacity in defence-related shipbuilding. At a time when the global security environment is under threat from hostile players on both the military and economic fronts, a strengthened and busy Ontario Shipyards is good for Canada.”

            Add the fact that Ontario Shipyards is headquartered in the province’s industrial heartland — “When we recently built a ferry for the Ontario government, we had every piece of steel cut bent, matched, ready to weld, and brought to the shipyard in a timely manner because there’s four or five companies within 20 minutes of us that do this work,” Kirkpatrick told CDR — and building the Kingston-class replacements here is an intelligent choice for the Canadian government. This is why Ontario Shipyards, and Team Vigilance in general, has so much to offer the NSS.

James Careless is CDR’s Ottawa Bureau Chief