Canada's naval forces on the Atlantic coast consist of the fleet, a diving unit, a ship repair unit, a logistics supply system, an intelligence and information fusion centre, and a naval headquarters.
My focus is always on preserving and increasing the operational readiness of these forces, ensuring excellence in operations and preserving the fine reputation of the Royal Canadian Navy as second to none in our circle of allies. The recent award of a Meritorious Unit Commendation to HMCS Toronto by the United States speaks directly to our single-minded intent.
Since naval power includes unique aviation capabilities, it bears noting that 12 Wing Shearwater is where the helicopters of the fleet are based. From 14 Wing Greenwood, long-range patrol aircraft provide targeting, tracking, and surveillance to our naval forces.
A foundation of infrastructure and services support the operational elements of naval power. These are formed under Canadian Forces Base Halifax, arguably the largest base in the Canadian Armed Forces.
[Translation]
The fleet comprises seven frigates of the Halifax class, the remaining destroyer of the Iroquois class, six coastal patrol vessels of the Kingston class, and presently one submarine of the Victoria class.
There are roughly 2,700 Regular Force Canadian Armed Forces members serving aboard ships of the fleet and another 1,500 ashore in readiness generation support activities of one kind or another.
In addition, 2,100 public service employees, mainly in technical and operational trades form an essential element of the defence team supporting the Atlantic Fleet.
[English]
Halifax class modernization is the main focus of activity, and the turning point of the project was the recent deployment of HMCS Fredericton to the NATO Reassurance mission. The ship's crew is flawlessly executing our maritime security mission in the Mediterranean Sea with NATO allies.
Aside from Fredericton, three other ships have been modernized at Irving Shipbuilding, and their readiness is building quickly, each available for tasking to some degree or another. Government, navy, and industry cooperation remains exceptional and contributes to the rapid return to readiness of these wonderfully capable and broadly useful warships. As the major ships return the fleet to operational utility, scheduling and readiness pressures are easing. Two modernized frigates are fully committed to aiding the Royal Canadian Air Force deliver the Cyclone helicopter, in and amongst their own readiness and continental defence activities.
[Translation]
It is important to note that naval operations are conducted as multi-ship endeavours, coordinated with submarines and air forces, informed by intelligence and information networks, and driven by command and control nodes. Consequently, major task group exercises need to be conceived nationally and with our allies in order to create operational readiness. No one ship, fleet or navy brings the total capability required to a complex maritime operation without helping each other.
[English]
In the case of the Atlantic fleet task group, exercises with the United States naval counterparts are underway in eastern seaboard waters involving HMCS Montreal and the flagship Athabaskan. The sharing of resources between the two navies in order to achieve the highest impact on learning possible is commonplace.
The recent retirement of the Protecteur class replenishment ship presents a challenge. However, relationships with allies are strong, and careful scheduling and fleet planning are ensuring that Canadian naval forces continue to receive the training required for difficult replenishment operations under way, while preserving to some degree our freedom of manoeuvre across the vast distances of the North Atlantic and in the European theatre.
The submarine Windsor is operating in and out of this east coast task group exercise as her own readiness validation proceeds. The technical and operational readiness of the submarine will peak this summer, and then she will stand ready to be employed in the Atlantic theatre, supported by deployed logistics, engineering, and operational support elements.
I am very pleased to report that the investment in the new submarine shelter in Halifax and the refurbishment of the associated Syncrolift dock allowed Windsor to have the defective diesel generator repaired quickly. Simultaneously, the navy ship repair workers installed a modernized sonar system of the same variety as is used in the nuclear attack submarines of the United States Navy. This success highlights the necessity of an effective and close relationship between the fleet and a strong repair capacity.
Our efforts in generating operational readiness are focused on maintaining a Canadian naval task group at high readiness, combining elements of the east and west coast fleets to sustain a rapidly deployable, logistically supported, and agile force capable of undertaking a broad range of defence and security tasks.
In the Caribbean sea, two patrol ships, Shawinigan and Goose Bay, and two more in the Pacific, Nanaimo and Whitehorse, are operating in support of the United States Coast Guard-led Joint Interagency Task Force South. Each ship carries aboard the United States Coast Guard law enforcement detachment under whose authority they conduct the drug interdictions. The important mission is taking drugs off the streets of Canada and the United States while impacting illegal revenues generated by the illicit trade that weakens South and Central American countries.
During these missions, our ships engage in capacity building with the navies of 14 partner states that contribute to the mission, supporting regional engagement. They stand ready in the event that there is a call for humanitarian aid or disaster relief.
[Translation]
In the Arctic, the Atlantic Fleet is a strong partner in the whole of government effort to exert and protect Canadian sovereignty. Our ships routinely join Op Nanook and are integral partners with Joint Task Force North, the Canadian Coast Guard, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the Canadian Hydrographic Service, the Canada Border Services Agency, the RCMP and the Government of Nunavut, amongst others.
These vibrant relationships were demonstrated in the successful search for the lost ships of the Franklin Expedition in 2014.
[English]
The platform of collaboration created by the marine security operations centre facilitates very effective intergovernmental interactions to ensure that security partners can respond effectively and quickly to emerging threats. The behaviour is practised annually through exercise scenarios under my joint task force command mandate. I reach out to both federal and provincial authorities to ensure that partner agencies are networked and have a thorough understanding of the military capabilities that can be employed to help manage the consequences of crisis situations, natural disasters, and humanitarian arisings. The Canadian maritime response to the Ebola crisis, illegal drug importation, major marine disasters, and terrorism are cases in point where effective collaboration and cooperation are readily apparent.
Aside from these activities in the Arctic and in the Americas, and presently on NATO Reassurance, naval ships contribute to maritime domain awareness every day they are at sea. Moreover, a warship is committed to being the ready duty ship, ready to sail at eight hours notice every day of the year. While ships are active on the seas staff ashore work tirelessly to build and improve relationships with partners, with organizations like NORAD; in the international SAR cooperation; with the Tri-Party, which is the Joint Task Force Atlantic, the United States Coast Guard, and the United States Navy; and in theatre anti-submarine warfare.
In closing, I'd like to speak just for one brief moment on search and rescue and my command of the Halifax SAR region. It includes the land areas of the Atlantic provinces, Labrador, and half of Baffin Island, and the ocean areas of the western North Atlantic, Labrador Sea, and Davis Strait.
My mandate is the provision of aeronautical and marine SAR, employing air forces of the Royal Canadian Air Force and ships of the Canadian Coast Guard. Given the broad maritime domain, frequent extreme weather, winter icing, busy international shipping lanes, active domestic and international fisheries, tourism, and Canada's only offshore petroleum production fields, search and rescue in the region is busy and demanding. Despite this it is very successfully managed due to the expertise and professionalism of the rescue boat crews, the flight crews, and the search and rescue technicians. Constant liaison with the various SAR stakeholders, tactical and operational level exercises, and collaboration with provincial and territorial governments ensures that the system functions optimally.
Mesdames et messieurs, thank you for the opportunity to provide this broad overview of a complex and very wide defence and security mandate of the navy, Joint Task Force Atlantic, the marine security operations centre, and of search and rescue.
:
It's an excellent question, sir, and a very broad question.
There are several threats in the international realm right now, or several rapidly developing situations. One is the continuing unrest in several Arab countries and in the Middle East; the other is Russia's aggression in the Ukraine. Each of these is different. I don't know whether I can draw lines between Russia and the Arab Spring phenomenon, but Canada's government has shown a distinct policy intent to demonstrate forward presence using elements of the Canadian Armed Forces.
One of the elements chosen was the Royal Canadian Navy. We have been an active participant in the CTF-150, which is the Combined Task Force 150, in the northern Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. Right now, the Royal Canadian Navy has a commodore and 20 Canadians commanding the combined task force, which has ships of France, Britain, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the U.S., and the U.S. Coast Guard passing through the command from time to time.
Why are we there? We are there to demonstrate the interest of Canada in those important and strategic waterways that flow through the Strait of Hormuz, where the energy flows of the planet focus. We're there to learn about the Indian Ocean, to help like-minded states and states with a desire to move toward legitimate use of the seas and democratic ideals build capacity in their militaries. We're there to learn relationships among nations and to develop a trust for Canadian Armed Forces in the region.
We do not have a ship there. We've moved our ship from CTF-150 into the Mediterranean Sea to deal with that other adversarial situation with Russia, and to reassure our NATO allies, especially Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey—countries such as those—that NATO stands behind its article 5 statement of collective defence anywhere at any time. Our navy is doing what it can, forward-deployed with like-minded navies of the coalition and CTF-150, or with the NATO alliance.
In the Canadian Arctic, there is no doubt increased activity. It's mainly commercial; it's mainly tourism-related; it's mainly related to changes in the ice regime and climate. However, there are military phenomena in the north, but mainly reserved for my friends in NORAD to deal with. The Royal Canadian Navy continues to go to the Arctic as a full partner with all the other government departments to help in the management of consequences of oil spills, search and rescue, crashed airliners that are using the polar air routes, or even something military that might develop on land. But I wouldn't want to overstate here that there is aggression or a military threat in the Arctic.
The Combined Task Force 150, in the Arabian Sea, in sea lanes that reach all the way back to Africa, through the Suez Canal, into southern Europe, and actually flow drugs into the United States—the very thing that HMCS Toronto was just provided a meritorious unit commendation for— their mission is counterterrorism and maritime security. It's to prevent the seaways of the world from being used to move illicit cargoes and terrorists, and from being used for other activities, such as human smuggling and arms shipments. We're there to network with like-minded nations, with police services such as Interpol and the RCMP, to actually try to get into the undercurrent of these illegal activities.
In North America we do the same thing with the marine security operations centre. The partners there are CSIS, the RCMP, and the Border Services Agency. All of us have an interest in closing down the seaways, especially the big ships carrying containers, but also the ships under 300 tonnes that can actually slip underneath our radar coverage if we don't pay attention to them.
The platform that Canada has created and is running very effectively is the MSOC. Just to give you an idea of how effective this MSOC is, which normally looks out to sea, when the shootings occurred here on Parliament Hill and the tragic event happened at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, the partners of the MSOC turned inward in Halifax, called me up and said that the three police agencies of the country— CBSA, CSIS, and the RCMP—were actually looking at their defence partners and keeping our backs safe. That was from the partnership created looking outwards. They were able to give me the confidence that our soldiers were safe in Halifax while we were trying to understand the depth of the issues happening in Ottawa.
I would say that the relationship is very effective. It allows us to exercise a scenario such as we did last year in Pictou, Nova Scotia, where we actually ran a counterterrorism scenario.
The Special Operations Forces of Canada participate in the scenario. They're brought in to do strikes at sea using their own maritime capacities, which are married to the Royal Canadian Navy capabilities and married to the other agencies, such as the coast guard and their ships, and aircraft.
Then we brought in a decontamination capacity from the Canadian army to deal with the chemical agents that might be involved in a terrorist-type strike.
This is the kind of thinking military men and women do. We don't do it on our own. We have a whole-of-government agency behind us to allow all the elements of security to work in order to defeat the terrorist threat.
:
Sir, it goes right to the heart of my mission. With my mission, one of my principle day-to-day jobs is to develop domain awareness.
Maritime domain awareness is more than just dots on a chart of the sea of positions of ships or ice. For every ship and every boat, it's an understanding of where that track is heading, who is the owner, agent, insurer, charterer, or broker, who's on that crew list, and what's in those cargoes. Maritime domain awareness is this very deep understanding of the intent of these tracks. Normally, 99.9% of everything is legitimate and legal, but in that very complex environment of shipping, where there are brokers and agents and owners and containers and insurers and product, you can lose a small detail.
Our job is to provide maritime domain awareness to NORAD, which is a client of the awareness. Their worry is that a submarine, cruise missile launching boat, ballistic missile launching ship, or an intelligence-gathering ship, like the one that is currently off the U.S. eastern seaboard, would do something damaging to the North American security enterprise.
Since 9/11, NORAD has adopted this role called “maritime warning”; it's an adjunct to the aerospace defence. We provide them with the information; they turn it into a warning.
It really comes to fruition when we do theatre anti-submarine warfare because cruise missiles launched from submarines are probably the biggest threat.
:
I'm going to have to be very circumspect.
Submarines generate an intense amount of confidential information because of the sources, and how we know what submarines are up to is a very compartmental type of information.
Suffice it to say, countries are building submarines. In the northern oceans new ballistic missile-carrying and new attack submarines have been built and are being trialled after a long lull in shipbuilding.
In the Indian Ocean new submarines have been imported from a submarine shipbuilder. One of our global competitors has been selling a certain type of submarine to foreign navies, and submarines are being used by these navies as area or access denial tools. They are an incredible weapons system that own vast areas of ocean because they're hidden in it and you must assume, like a mine, that they are there somewhere. It gathers intelligence and it just forces everybody to stand back and take a far deeper breath when operating in that area.
The utility of submarines to our potential adversaries is quite clear to them, and they're good shipbuilders in this regard.
We work with an alliance and the power of the alliance of Britain, France, the United States, Norway, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and all our NATO allies together creates a much stronger force than a single potential adversary.
:
The ships were delivered starting in 1990 and they therefore had the technology of the 1990 to 2000 timeframe incorporated into the original build. It was a wonderfully capable technology in that era. You can imagine, though, the computers were fairly big and they ate up a lot of room and demanded a lot of air conditioning. That's just one piece that changes with modernization. There's a considerable amount of miniaturization and with it space and volume liberation in the ship. That volume liberation in a fairly large ship can go to other uses.
I'll give you three pieces of modernization that came with this technology change. One is liberation of space and so the four lead ships of the modernization can be made into flagships for the force so that we can bridge across the period where we don't have a Canadian surface combatant, where we don't have the Iroquois-class which gave us our task force command capabilities. So we've got volume and we added that volume to the operations room of the ship. We put in the command and control consoles and now we have a bridging capacity to the future.
Another element of modernization is in the old ship damage control. Keeping the ship afloat and fighting fire and flood was a separate capacity from running the engines, the auxiliary equipment, and the air conditioning. The fact is, in a warship that floats on the sea the two of them are actually one and the same. You want to fight against fire and flood at the same time that you operate your machinery. In fact, a lot of the machinery we operate contributes to the fighting of damage. We've incorporated in the modernization those two inherently related systems into one integrated platform management system. It is a wonderful interactive system where people stand in front of major computer screens that demand lots of electricity, but they can intuitively direct the battle against the debilitating damage of battle. Our job is to fight, survive the damage, and win the exchange.
The third element is we increased the sensor, radars, and weapons system functioning and capacities of the ship, especially in the above-water domain. We've upgraded a missile system, added a three-dimensional radar, have much more precise fire control radars, and modernized elements of the gun and electronic warfare system so that the ship can actually confront, survive, and win in an exchange with, let's say, fifth-generation missiles of potential adversaries. We're in the full-up development of this new combat suite right now.
:
I admit that we are a general purpose navy. We don't want to be pigeonholed in any particular niche, so we are trying to develop an agile, responsive, multi-purpose, retoolable navy, depending on the mission scenario.
Our submarine, sir, introduces a very small submarine. It doesn't have the big underwater signature of a nuclear boat. It can get into shallow waters and it can survey coasts, bays, inlets, and the shelf waters that are prevalent around the world. It takes advantage of the way sound propagates in the ocean, and it can hide using sound channels and sea bottom features where a nuclear submarine would just not be the right tool to use. It's an adjunct or a complementary element to the big nuclear submarines of the blue water. It can be used in the blue water. In fact the submarine was made by the British for the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. gap, which is a very turbulent and a very cold and difficult body of water to hunt submarines in.
We know we have a good submarine. It's proving itself daily when it operates against the best submariners in the world, and they have a heck of a time dealing with it. I imagine our guys have a heck of a time dealing with those submarines too, but there's a mutual respect of two fundamentally different classes of ships.
On the second part of your question, we practise and we look for scenarios with foreign navies and countries to develop this broadly useful navy. We will go into major exercises, creating scenarios that make sure we're not pigeonholed into just anti-submarine warfare and that we are actually able to do escort, maritime interdiction operations, or counter-drug boardings.
At this time we're building a third generation of our naval boarding party capacity, which is like a SWAT team at sea. We're coming up to a level just underneath counterterrorist special operations forces, so we can be their support for maritime counterterrorism. We're continually looking for these areas to broaden the utility of our navy.
:
That's always a tough question, but I think I have a very recent example to illuminate what you're getting at, ma'am.
In the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, there are many states and many regional conflict centres. There are many competing issues, and none more so than the flow of massive amounts of energy to the world markets. But in that body of water we also have the Horn of Africa, and there was a piracy issue, which has been driven down to a fairly low level.
Fairly unknown to most people is the flow of drugs from Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan across the waterways in ships that are smuggling them. They're in Arab dhows, which is a fishing-style boat. Often the crews don't know they're carrying the drugs. They're smuggled into the hull and hidden in the woodwork of the boats. The drug shipments are occurring in east Africa, into Tanzania and Kenya, where they then make their way into a land bridge and into southern Europe. Some of those drugs actually reach North America.
But that's not the issue. We're in that mission by government mandate for counterterrorism and maritime security reasons. The linkage between those drugs and terrorism is that the funding of the drug shipments—the buys, the middlemen, the licensing to transport it out of Afghanistan or whatever—pays terrorist organizations their revenue. It's one of their key revenue-generation streams. By interdicting the drugs, we're denying a terrorist the financial backing he requires to hire and train his people, buy the ordnance and explosives, and to do his business.
That's a key element. That's what HMCS Toronto was recognized for by the chief of naval operations last week. They did eight major boardings involving more drugs than any police force in the world would take off the streets in a year. The amount of drugs that were taken out of the maritime seaways just dominates that by a hundredfold. That does hit at somebody's pocketbook and it does go back to terrorism.
That is a non-state linkage in which the navy has been participating. It's also the same one that's active in the Caribbean. The drug money in the Caribbean is destabilizing states like Mexico and other countries. It corrupts and co-opts, and it's not just about the drugs making it to our streets.
:
Oh, we're thrilled to death with the Halifax class modernization. It is moving very quickly toward full-up success in so many different ways. The capacities of new technology undoubtedly give you more capability than you had in older systems.
The number of ships is a quality in its own right, and we will see the number of our ships repair fairly quickly with the delivery of a whole new class of ships called the arctic offshore patrol ships or the Harry DeWolf class. This is going to push the Canadian navy fully as a partner into the Arctic domain.
We've come through a period of difficult sailing with our submarine fleet, and we are well on our way to operating three submarines, because we've committed the resources, talent, and intellect in our training with allies to generate them to high readiness.
Regrettably, we've laid up three of our ships which thrilled the heck out of us in our operational life over 40-plus years, and we couldn't have asked them to do more. We are sad for the sailors who put so much into them, but our navy is transitioning very quickly to the modernized Halifax class, working with a modernized air force. We can see in the front windshield the Cyclone coming at us. We believe in our submarines like nobody else, and we are being asked to participate in international operations because we still have effect and relevance.
I would say, sir, that we've taken the back end of the business and given it a strong shaking. We call it “evolving the business of our business”. We've emptied out all the ways we've done business. We've thrown all the Scrabble pieces on the floor, and we've rewritten doctrine, policy, and planning in the Royal Canadian Navy to always prioritize the generation of the fleet. Maybe we've kicked ourselves about the way we used to do things in our schoolhouses, the way we ran our governance, and how we had different people doing the same thing, and we got it down to as lean as we can to bridge to this period of the modernized fleet.
:
Sir, the navy is pretty proud of the fact that it has a long heritage operating in the north and leading the rest of government to solve Arctic problems.
HMCS Labrador was a navy ship in 1954. It cruised the Northwest Passage, helped build the DEW line, and put Canada in the north in a particular period in time when sovereignty was in our highest demand, and there was a full-blown Cold War. All through the seventies and eighties we led science missions and universities to the north on our ships. We returned to the north with a vengeance after a 10-year gap in 2001, the year of 9/11. We are the ones who put joint task force exercises on the map in the north with Operation Narwhal, or Exercise Narwhal at the time, which has evolved into Nanook.
To us, the Arctic is a maritime domain. It's an archipelago, an inland sea, the Arctic Ocean, Baffin Bay, Davis Strait, and the Beaufort Sea. We have been a good partner there. We just need to expand the period of time when we can be the partner in that maritime domain, and that's what AOPS is going to give us.
If it comes down to search and rescue, you are probably going to have a maritime component, because the aboriginal peoples use the water to move in the Arctic. If it's going to be a loss of a helicopter or an airline crash in the north, dime to dozen it's going to find water and it's going to have a diving component. If it's increased shipping, there could be an accident. There could be casualties and evacuees, and that was the scenario of Nanook last year. Also, there could be an environmental element in our pristine north, which is something the coast guard and Transport Canada are focusing on.
The navy is well situated. It was well situated. It will be exceptionally well situated with the arctic offshore patrol ship. It's a big ship, long-range, high-volume, and multi-purpose. It's the perfect element of support—arms support, constabulary support—toward the other federal departments. We've already built the teamwork to be a whole-of-government presence in the north.
:
Thank you, and thank you for your frank answer to the question that my colleague, Jack Harris, asked.
I think it's important for the listeners and the viewers of this committee to know that there are members of Parliament who are holding the government to account for having said one thing and done another and that we are asking how this actually affects the Canadian Armed Forces. And, frankly, I think that it's fine for the government-side members to preen their feathers about how great the government is doing, but the reality is that there have been significant budget cuts and somebody called it, “...a snarled, impossible mess, riven with intra-governmental factionalism and disputes, with no relief in sight...”, in terms of procurement. That does affect the operations of the forces, so I think these are fair questions, and Canadians deserve to ask them, so thank you for your respectful answers.
I've got four quick questions, and we only have time for quick answers.
One is, when you talked about “we've laid up three of our ships”, from your perspective, if you were involved with this decision at all, was it about the reductions of Royal Canadian Navy personnel, or was it the reductions in the budget that caused them to be laid up so much earlier than planned?
Two, with respect to the Cyclone, we're celebrating the idea of them, but they were claimed to be delivered in 2009 by this government, and there are still none. So my question is, how have these massive delays actually affected the Maritime Atlantic operations and joint task force operations from Atlantic?
Three is the Auroras, one of the many failures to deliver. They were to be replaced by 2020. According to Professor Sloan, the delays up to 2035 appeared to be monetary—in other words, budget cutting for the election. So my question is, if only 10 Auroras from the original 18 are being modernized, is that sufficient for surveillance and reconnaissance over Canada's vast maritime areas?
Lastly, a briefing note talks about hundreds of arrangements the military has with allies to share facilities, and services are being called into question because of a whole layer of bureaucracy that the government has put into place. Has that affected any of your sharing arrangements with your allies in terms of joint operations or joint facilities?