Weekend Listen: What Canada’s C$11 billion new icebreakers mean for Arctic sovereignty
Last week in Lévis, Quebec, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Ottawa would put more than C$11 billion into six new icebreakers for the Canadian Coast Guard, to be built by Chantier Davie and to replace the service’s ageing heavy and medium vessels. The six will be Polar Class III ships, a separate line of work from the two heavy polar icebreakers already under construction, the first of which had its keel laid at Davie’s Helsinki Shipyard in May.
The scale of the commitment invites the obvious question: what does a fleet like this actually do, and for whom?
In the latest instalment of the CDA Institute’s Expert Series, Jody Thomas takes that question apart. Thomas is unusually well placed to do it, having served as commissioner of the Canadian Coast Guard, deputy minister of national defence and national security adviser to the prime minister. She looks at what the new fleet means for Arctic security and sovereignty, at the Coast Guard’s move under National Defence and its growing role in intelligence collection and maritime domain awareness, and at the trade-offs of insisting the ships be built in Canada. That trade-off is already visible in the program. Davie bought Helsinki Shipyard in 2023, and Finnish yards are cutting the hulls because few other countries have retained the capacity to build icebreakers at all.
The CDA Institute is a non-partisan Ottawa charity founded in 1987 by the Conference of Defence Associations, which has served as an umbrella body for Canada’s military associations since 1932.
Listen to the full conversation below:
