On Sept. 6 at 4:22 p.m. Heddle Shipyards filed its application to be considered the third shipyard in the National Ship Building Strategy.
If approved it would have meant billions of dollars worth of work for the Ontario company building six new ice breakers for the Canadian Coast Guard.
Ships that, whoever builds them, will replace the ageing fleet that largely operates from Atlantic Canada.
Though its larger dry dock facilities are in Hamilton and Port Weller, Heddle also operates facilities at Sydport and Mount Pearl.
An hour after Heddle filed its application, the federal government invoked a national security clause to shut down a Canadian International Trade Tribunal investigation into whether the entire process had been slanted toward giving the work to a Quebec shipyard.
The federal government didn’t have to identify why the investigation, meant to determine whether the invitation to qualify procurement process was fair, would harm national security because it had changed the rules governing use of the clause earlier in 2019.
And on Thursday it still wasn’t directly answering the question.
“The Canadian Coast Guard has requested a National Security Exemption for their procurement because their work is essential to develop and maintain Canada’s national security capacity by supporting law enforcement agencies, national and international fisheries patrols, maintaining and further developing Canada’s presence in the Arctic in support of Canada’s assertion of its sovereignty and maintaining access to Canadian waterways at any time,” reads a written response provided by Fisheries and Oceans Canada on Thursday.
What the response doesn’t address is why an investigation of whether bias was present in the procurement process was a threat to national security?
The move has raised eyebrows in defence circles.
“This is not to say that the government will not conduct an open and fair competition but the narrative suggests this is about a government providing jobs in Quebec for election purposes rather than what it might want Canadians to believe,” professor Craig Stone of the Canadian Forces College wrote recently in a policy brief for the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.
“… Again, the implication for Canadians is that the government is doing this to win or sustain votes. In an election year, it is not hard to support this narrative.”
At its May announcement of 18 new ships for the Canadian Coast Guard, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hinted that Quebec’s Chantier Davie Canada Inc. would be a front runner.
“We recognize that it’s an opportunity for Davie to apply to become that third shipbuilding facility because there will be a tremendous amount of work in the coming years for workers in our shipbuilding industry right across the country from coast, to coast, to coast,” said Trudeau.
Then when Procurement Canada released the invitation to apply on Aug. 2 it included a stipulation that applicant shipyards had to be able to build and deliver vessels over 24 metres wide.
That eliminated Ontario shipyards inside of the Saint Lawrence Seaway locks system, which only allows passage of vessels 24 metres wide.
But the winter job of the six medium to heavy ice breakers that the third shipyard would be expected to build is to break ice inside of the Saint Lawrence Seaway system. They spend much of their spring, summer and fall on the east coast and working in the Arctic.
“The width was a glaringly obvious one. Along with that you had to be able to deliver ships 12 months of the year – well, we can build year round but we can’t deliver when the locks system are shut down for maintenance during the winter months,” Shawn Padulo, Heddle’s president, told The Chronicle Herald on Thursday.
“There was a multitude of requirements we felt were there to disqualify us.”
In response to a complaint Heddle Shipyards filed with the Canadian International Trade Tribunal, the federal government changed what it referred to as “inconsistencies” in the invitation to qualify requirements.
While it dropped the width and 12 month delivery requirements, it kept one demanding that applicant yards have the ability to install an over 1,000 tonne module into an offshore structure.
“That’s like something you’d do with Deep Panuke or Hebron, I don’t see why that would be a requirement,” said Padulo.
“Davie is the only one that has done that in recent years.”
Former navy commander and current maritime analyst Ken Hansen warns that it’s hard to keep politics out of huge shipbuilding contracts with their billions of dollars for highly skilled work.
The bad blood between Davie and Irving, which won the most valuable surface combatant portion of the National Shipbuilding Strategy, is well documented.
“There is a lot of enmity between these two shipyards that goes back a long way,” said Hansen.
“It’s very antagonistic and it doesn’t help when politics gets in its midst. An election forthcoming is bound to bring this out.”
But if there’s going to a fair and transparent competition, Hansen said Heddle deserves to be part of it.
And it is.
But whether it ever actually had a chance won’t be known until after Monday’s election.
“We’ve been told we wouldn’t find out which shipyard is chosen until after the election,” said Padulo. “…If it’s a fair, open and transparent process as the Liberals call it, we’ve got a good shot.”
