A walk around the streets of Collingwood is a reminder that places in Ontario used to build big ships. The Collingwood shipyard, which operated for about a century until it closed in 1986, built over 200 ships, including 23 warships during World War II. Like much of post-industrial Ontario, the grounds of the old shipyard are being reclaimed by new development — but the remnants of the maritime tradition are still visible.
So it’s not crazy, exactly, that Doug Ford supports an effort by Ontario-based companies to land a major federal shipbuilding contract. The Royal Canadian Navy wants to replace its current fleet of Kingston-class corvettes with something more modern and capable, and Ontario Shipyards, a company with facilities in Thunder Bay, Hamilton, and St. Catharines, would very much like to be part of the team that builds them.
So far, so good: it’s fine for the premier to support Ontario-based companies bidding on a major federal contract. This is something that Ontario used to do a lot of, and it doesn’t totally stretch credibility to believe that we could do it again.
The catch, as reported by The Trillium, is that it’s not like the premier’s involvement is entirely innocent. Ontario Shipyards is a client of Rubicon Strategies, the lobbying firm that happens to be owned by Kory Teneycke, a close advisor to the premier and campaign manager for Ford’s PC Party in the last two elections. Ford says Teneycke’s connection has nothing to do with anything, and indeed, there’s no evidence of anything like misconduct in this case (though Ontario Shipyards is also a recipient of grants from the scandal-plagued Skills Development Fund); citizens are allowed to raise an eyebrow anyway.
If you’re tempted to think that this kind of grubbiness is what happens when humble provincial politicians wade into the serious, august matters of national defence policy, I have bad news for you: it’s far from obvious that the feds are treating these matters any more seriously than Ford is.
Earlier this month, in Toronto, the federal industry minister Mélanie Joly was speaking to the Empire Club of Canada, laying out what this country is hoping to achieve with its procurement policies. Joly isn’t the defence minister; it’s not her job to comment on things like the capabilities of different fighter jets. Instead, she was talking about the benefits of building a more robust domestic supply chain for Canadian military procurement through “buy Canadian” policies.
Again, this is all fair enough. We can argue about whether this actually gets Canada the military it needs with the most efficient expenditure of scarce tax dollars, but at the end of the day that’s a kind of argument that happens almost entirely between newspaper op-ed pages and not between actual voters or the political parties seeking their support. This gets complicated, though, when we talk about equipping Canadian servicemembers with the best possible hardware. In some cases it’s not really plausible for advanced systems to be built here. Joly and her cabinet colleagues (including the guy at the head of the table, Prime Minister Mark Carney) are weighing exactly this issue in a contest over whether to award a submarine contract to a German or Korean firm. Which is where things took a turn.
“Fundamentally, what we want also is a car plant,” Joly told her audience. “That’s why we’re talking also with the Germans and the Koreans, because we think we can attract more investment in the auto sector through leveraging defence investments.”
The Koreans, according to Bloomberg News, are offering a counter-bid of hydrogen fuelling corridors, but not tying their submarine bid directly to auto investments. Volkswagen doesn’t currently have a plant in Canada, but is the owner of the EV battery plant under construction in St. Thomas. As Canada looks to diversify its manufacturing economy away from a reliance on the United States, either or both would, I’m sure, be welcomed with open arms if they chose to make major auto investments here.
But, to state the obvious, an auto plant in Ontario has absolutely nothing to do with what submarine can best serve the needs of the Royal Canadian Navy. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on submarine design, and I’ve been at this long enough to know that the sausage-making that goes into large purchases never looks particularly virtuous from the outside. But the plain meaning of Joly’s words suggests that Ottawa would be willing to walk away from an otherwise meritorious Korean bid to build us submarines unless Hyundai or Kia agrees to open a plant somewhere in southern Ontario. That’s nuts.
The Carney government has pledged to substantially increase Canadian military spending, and there’s every reason to believe that Ontario will benefit from that simply because of the breadth and depth of our industrial base here. The COVID years also taught us how valuable domestic capacity is in a crisis, so I’m not going to whine about the potential for waste in “Buy Canada” policies. Our leaders shouldn’t make defence policy carry the weight for unrelated policies, and we shouldn’t ask them to.