rickusn

Last summer, Victoria went into an extended docking work period that was supposed to be completed by June 2007.

Victoria is now slated to come out of dry dock between February and April of 2008. After that, "there’s still an awful lot of work that has to be done alongside," said Mr. Thomson, adding that should be completed by June 2008.

It should take an additional 40 weeks for the navy to run acceptance trials on Victoria, he said. That means the sub won’t be operational until the spring of 2009.

Canada announced a deal in 1998 to acquire four used subs from Britain for $891 million.

Halifax-based HMCS Windsor is the only one that has gone to sea lately.

HMCS Corner Brook hasn’t left Halifax since April 2004. It won’t start sea trials until this summer.

Last month, Ottawa announced that repairs to the fire-damaged HMCS Chicoutimi have been delayed until 2010. The sub has been sitting at the Halifax Shipyard since last spring because of a fire on board on Oct. 5, 2004, that killed Lieut. Chris Saunders of Halifax.

Repairs to Chicoutimi — pegged at $100 million — won’t start until 2010. The navy says the sub will return to active duty in 2012, eight years after it last went to sea.

rickusn

More unhappiness:

Greg WestonSun, May 14, 2006

Submarines sinking in a sea of red ink

The four submarines Canada bought from Britain in 1998 have turned from a bargain into a fleet of white elephants, reports Greg Weston
By Greg Weston

This weekend's tour of the federal funny farm takes us to the Department of National Defence, home to one of the world's only submarine fleets stationed predominantly on dry land.

According to the latest naval intelligence, or lack thereof, three of Canada's four illustrious subs are now high and dry and diving into a sea of red ink in various coastal shipyards.

One of the subs has been in the repair shop in Halifax for three years, another won't be wet again until at least 2008, and the third one will be lucky to see the ocean floor before 2013.

The only member of this unique landlubbing fleet still in service, the Windsor, is also being hauled out of the water in 2007 for an estimated three years of repair and refit.

As if Canadian taxpayers could ever forget, these are the four used rust buckets that Jean Chretien's government cleverly bought from the British navy for $811 million in 1998.

In the exact words of then Liberal defence minister Art Eggleton: "These submarines are a great purchase for Canada."

Unfortunately, Canadian defence officials apparently never questioned why the Brits were so eager to unload their barely-used vessels at such bargain-basement prices.

As usual, we got what we paid for.

After more than a decade of being dockside decorations in a British shipyard, the subs had rusted on the outside, rotted from the inside, and required hundreds of millions of dollars of repair just to make them marginally seaworthy.

The last one to set sail for Canada from the eternal repair shop in Scotland was the Chicoutimi. It got a whole two days out to sea in 2004 before being crippled by an onboard fire that killed a Canadian seaman and injured eight others.

At that point, the admirals and the Liberal politicians could have bitten the ballast, admitted they had made a terrible mistake, and consigned the whole sub fleet to the scrapyard, at least saving taxpayers a fortune in good money after bad.

Alas, bureaucratic butt-covering triumphed in the defence department once again -- supported, we should add, by the collective genius of Paul Martin's administration -- and the decision was made that there is nothing other people's money couldn't fix, including a bunch of lemon submarines.

While defence officials publicly estimated repairs to the Chicoutimi wouldn't cost more than about $50 million, internal government documents obtained by Sun Media suggest a sub salvage sailing towards an ocean of bills several times that amount. Last August, for instance, the government issued the second of two contracts totalling more than $15 million, not to actually repair the Chicoutimi -- just to draft the plan to fix it.

And a significant stack of contract documents and memos details plans to provide the naval brass and about 30 staff with new dockside offices, complete with all-new furniture and a gym, for the indefinite period of the Chicoutimi repair.

No one seems quite sure how many millions got spent on repair plans and new desks before the light finally flickered on at defence headquarters, aided perhaps by a new Conservative government wondering what the heck was going on.

Without fanfare, National Defence recently issued an innocuous-looking press release saying the repairs to the Chicoutimi "will be deferred until 2010."

An unfortunate naval spokesman told us that since the Chicoutimi is due to be drydocked for its five-year routine maintenance in 2010, it didn't make sense to do three years of needed repairs now, put it back in the water for a year or so, and take it out again. It should now be in service by 2013.

By then, Canada will have owned the sub for 15 years, sunk at least $400 million of taxpayers' money into it, and had it in active military service for exactly two days.

Meanwhile, the other two subs in drydock are each sucking up at least $60 million just for their routine tune-up.

With any luck, long before 2013, Chicoutimi will be joined by the rest of the rust-bucket brigade somewhere they can finally serve the interests of all Canadians. In a museum.

Weston is Sun Media's national political columnist; his e-mail address is greg.weston@tor.sunpub.com, he can also be reached at 232-6078

canoe

Ya this is an ongoing drama in Canada at the moment. My personal opinion is we should just dump the subs now. Two of them are going to need major repairs just to get them operational and simply arn't worth the money Canada is sinking into them. Even if we got them up and running they all will need upgrades to bring them up to date with the rest of the world. And given our military taskings in the past decade I have to question the usefulness of subs versus other surface platforms that would better suit our needs.

In my opinion we should cut our losses and take the billions it would probably end up costing us to get all three subs running and spend it on 2 modified LPD landing ships and base one off each coast.

TopHatter

Sadly, you're probably right. I have a lot of respect for Great Britain but they gave you guys a royal screwing on that deal.

At the very least, they could have given those subs a "stem-to-stern" inspection and guaranteed the goods.

__________________
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
~John Quincy Adams

rickusn

Its a shame.

They should be with the exception of the Collins class the most versatile and capable diesel subs in the world.

And the Collins class has not been w/o problems either among them:

Software intergation
sotware system software deficiencies
hydrodynamic flow
cracked propellers
periscope vibration
flooding from a broken hose(enire fleet called in for corrective action)
engine and gearbox seal problems

I really like the Victoria(ex-Upholder) classes ability to snorkel at 19 kts. AFAIK no other diesel boat can do this. And again until the Collins class were able to quickly recharge their batteries thus vastly lowering their indiscretion rate. AFAIK other diesel boats are not as capable in this regard as these two classes.

Here we go again "in the world". Now those darn Brits have me doing it . LOL