Quotulatiousness

July 14, 2020

A previously unpublished photo of the 1917 Halifax explosion

Filed under: Cancon, History, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve posted a few items about the Halifax explosion, so Colby Cosh linking to this CBC News article caught my attention:

Previously unpublished photo of the Halifax explosion in December 1917 taken by Mate Reg Stevens, RCN.
Original image from the Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County, via CBC News.

“The photo has the look of a very troubling dream,” Dan Conlin says as he studies an old black-and-white image.

Conlin is a transportation historian who’s spent a lifetime studying images of ships, trains and aircraft. He’s also a former curator of Halifax’s Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, which houses a large collection of materials from the 1917 Halifax Explosion.

The image he’s studying surfaced recently on Reddit with a user from Halifax, England, wondering if it was a “new” image of the 1917 disaster.

“You have these tranquil little wavelets in the foreground and some stately, anchored vessels — including a sailing ship,” Conlin said. “But in the background there are these awful, nightmarish clouds, including a horrible column that is rising into the sky. It looks like a surreal nightmare.”

When Conlin first looked at it, the crisp details of the foreground and the blurry background raised his skeptical eyebrows. “There was quite a tradition in the World War I era of faking photos by doing composite photos, where you layer one image on top of another,” he said.

One well-known photo of the explosion taken from McNabs Island was later suspected to have been doctored by a company. They seem to have added clouds for dramatic effect — and to sell more postcards.

But Conlin thinks in the nightmarish photo, it’s more likely that the clouds are moving from the force of the explosion, while the ships were untroubled by any winds. The disaster killed nearly 2,000 people and badly hurt thousands more. It levelled the Richmond district in the north end.

“It’s carnage and destruction out of Dante at the base of that cloud. People are dying and fires are starting and this awful event has hit Halifax in the distance,” he said.

“That angry cloud gives you an idea of the violence and tragedy that is unfolding even as the shutter clicks. It’s really rare and that photo, as far as I can tell, has never been published.”

June 21, 2020

Paul Wells – “Everyone agrees!” [on the need to fully investigate the Nova Scotia massacre] … “But so far there is no inquiry”

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Paul Wells in Maclean’s:

We are faced, perhaps only temporarily, with a familiar Canadian paradox: everyone says they want something to happen, but it isn’t happening.

The “something” is a rigorous public inquiry into a horrible shooting spree that spanned two days and killed 22 people in Nova Scotia in mid-April. It was the worst mass murder in Canadian history. It was lurid in its weirdness. The gunman, Gabriel Wortman, spent two days driving around in a convincing replica RCMP vehicle, shooting at whim, while the force he was imitating and dodging failed to send out a more comprehensive emergency alert than their Twitter warnings, one that might have saved more lives. In the midst of the carnage, two actual RCMP officers apparently fired their weapons into the walls of a firehall in Onslow for reasons that remain unknown.

New reporting for Maclean’s by Shannon Gormley, Stephen Maher and Paul Palango raises troubling new questions about Wortman’s possible ties to organized crime and, especially, to the RCMP itself. This reporting is attracting a lot of attention and, here and there, vigorous online debate. This Twitter thread, for instance, asks hard questions about our latest story.

The questions raised by our investigative team including Paul Palango, author of three best-selling books (here, here and here) about the troubling history of the RCMP, are backed by a solid and growing network of well-informed sources. But past a certain point, even superb reporting can’t provide authoritative answers. That work is properly left to duly mandated public authorities, usually wearing judges’ robes. Some people, reading the most recent Maclean’s reporting, have said the RCMP has a lot of questions to answer. Unfortunately there is no reason to take any answer from the RCMP on faith. It’s time for a full judicial inquiry.

Everyone agrees! From Nova Scotia premier Stephen McNeil to the latest embattled RCMP commissioner to three Trudeau-appointed Nova Scotia senators to anguished families of the murdered to, I mean sort of, the Prime Minister. But so far there is no inquiry.

June 30, 2016

More tales from Garnet Rogers’ Night Drive

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

While I’m eagerly awaiting the delivery of my copy of Garnet’s book, here is a report from the Local Xpress on Garnet’s upcoming appearance at the Canso Stan Rogers Folk Festival this Canada Day weekend:

The length of the journey to Canso, home of the Stan Rogers Folk Festival, is no deterrent to the hardy hundreds who’ve packed the event every July long weekend for the past two decades.

But that winding Guysborough road is just a fraction of the journey that the festival’s namesake made with his brother and bandmate Garnet Rogers prior to Stan’s death in 1983. Many of those miles are chronicled in Garnet’s new book Night Drive: Travels With My Brother, which he’s launched in time for Stanfest’s 20th anniversary. The book stretches from their parents’ roots in Canso and Pictou County to the brothers’ final conversation at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. In between lies a rough and tumble tale of a furtive search for folk music glory, where it took more than talent to get ahead, and dreams seemed to get dashed on a daily basis.

    “Somebody made the comment that parents should buy the book and give it to any of their kids who decide they want to become a musician or a folksinger […] It really is kind of a cautionary tale.”

[…]

Decades later, much of it has been romanticized, and writing Night Drive was an opportunity for Garnet to strip away the rose-coloured glasses, and also tell his side of the story.

    “I got invited to this thing recently where the City of Hamilton is honouring Stan with a lifetime achievement award, making him a citizen of the city or something like that, sponsored by the Hamilton Spectator […] On the face of it, God bless them, but I felt like a bystander. There was no mention of the fact that I was there, or as far as Stan was concerned, 50 per cent of the equation.

    “Stan handed over 49 per cent of his publishing to me, half ownership of the songs, that should mean something in terms of how he at least perceived my contribution, but the average person doesn’t know any of that. So part of writing this was simply to say I was there. I don’t want someone coming up to me and giving me some blather about how seeing Stan changed their life and they’ll never forget that concert, but they don’t remember that I was there, because I bloody was.

    “So a lot of it was setting the record straight, but more importantly I wanted it to be funny.”

And much of the book is laugh-out-loud hilarious, as Rogers describes how he and his brother were performing the musical equivalent of “scrawling your name on a cave wall” while playing for distracted pit miners at a disco in Labrador City. Or in a pressure cooker of a bar in Jasper, Alta., where the audience was split down the middle between railway and oil rig workers who hated each other, which eventually erupted in a melee that nearly saw Stan charged with assault with a deadly weapon, in this case a mike stand.

    “There was something in that ‘three young guys in a van together’ thing […] Whether the gig was good, bad or indifferent, you could always find something to laugh about. Like the opening chapter about the non-existent gig in Baltimore and that young woman sitting on the couch with no underwear, every damn detail of that story is absolutely true, not even remotely exaggerated.

    “It was just as squalid as it sounds, and you come out of something like that, the worst disaster ever, but you’re laughing and laughing, and a few hours later you realize you’re miles from home and completely broke. But in the meantime you’ve got three young guys who are just dying with laughter because of the insanity of the situation.”

December 27, 2015

The refit and modernization program for the RCN’s Halifax class frigates

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

In the Chronicle Herald, Andrea Gunn reports on the Royal Canadian Navy’s refit program for the twelve ships in the HMCS Halifax class, being done in Victoria and Halifax:

A $4.3-billion, decade-long life extension and modernization of Canada’s Halifax-class frigates has now been completed on more than half the fleet.

Work started in 2010 on the mid-life refit and modernization process, which has been concluded on HMCS Halifax, Fredericton, Montreal and Charlottetown at the Irving-owned Halifax Shipyard, and on HMCS Calgary, Winnipeg and Vancouver at Seaspan in Victoria.

The other five vessels, HMCS St. John’s, Ottawa, Ville de Quebec and Toronto, have all entered refit and are at various stages of completion and testing. All major work for the program, which is on schedule and on budget, is set to be finished by 2019.

The project’s aim is to extend the lifespan of the fleet to sustain Canada’s naval operations during the design and construction phase of the new fleet of Canadian surface combatants, set to be delivered by 2033. The Halifax-class frigates have been in operation since 1992, and planning and preparation for the modernization project began in 2002.

Royal Canadian Navy Commodore Craig Baines, commander of the Atlantic fleet, recently returned from two months of major multinational exercises that utilized three of the modernized vessels. HMCS Halifax, Montreal and Winnipeg participated in Joint Warrior, and Winnipeg and Halifax participated in Trident Juncture, the largest NATO military exercise since the Cold War.

“From where we were previously to where we are now, it’s like you have a brand new ship,” Baines told The Chronicle Herald.

The modernized vessels are equipped with a new radar suite and have had major upgrades to the communications and warfare systems. But it’s the $2-billion upgrade to the fleet’s combat management systems — a completely redesigned command and control centre with plenty of new features — that is largely responsible for that new ship feel.

Click image to see full-sized. H/T to @RUSI_NS for the link.

Click image to see full-sized. H/T to @RUSI_NS for the link.

August 12, 2015

Better hops through science

Filed under: Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Wired, Katie M. Palmer discusses an interesting (if only to brewers and beer fans) development in the quest for better beer:

For craft breweries, originality is everything. Your favorite microbrew prides itself on the particular combination of grains, yeast, and hops that go into its fermented nectar. Regardless of the magic that goes into the recipe, though, a lot of those ingredients come from the same big suppliers — bulk barley, high-yield yeast. So when agricultural geneticist Sean Myles was visiting his brewing buddies over at Tatamagouche Brewing Company in Nova Scotia, the conversation turned quickly to the one place where microbreweries can really distinguish themselves: hop varieties.

“I’m a craft beer fanatic…a little bit,” says Myles, who researches at Dalhousie University. “I ended up hanging around the hop yard, and we were taking a look at the vines.” In Nova Scotia, brewers grow the same varieties of hops you’d see elsewhere — Cascade, Willamette, Fuggle — which add aroma, flavor, and bitterness to a beer while helping to preserve it. But the vines don’t thrive like they do on the dryer, warmer west coast. The region’s high humidity makes the plants vulnerable to mildew. Myles looked at the hops growing in the brewers’ backyard, stunted and suffering from fungus, and had an idea: “I said, well, let’s go get some pollen.”

So Myles and Hans Christian Jost from Tatamagouche traveled from Nova Scotia to Corvallis, Oregon, where the USDA has one of the biggest hop collections in the world. “In order to get new varieties you need to let these plants have sex and generate some offspring,” says Myles. The National Clonal Germplasm Repository — which includes a gene bank in addition to physical collections of berries, mint, and nuts — is one of the only places where hopheads have access to pollen from male plants. (The pine cone-shaped hops that go into your beer are the flower of female plants, so most growers don’t bother keeping any males around.)

At the USDA hop library, which has dozens of varieties bred for different taste profiles, disease resistance, and viability in different climates, Myles worked with hop expert John Henning to find four different male mildew-resistant hops. But he couldn’t take the plant material across the border to Canada — so he stuck baggies over the top of the plants, collected their pollen, and brought it back to sprinkle on top of the female flowers grown by the brewery.

That’s the beginning of what will be a multiple-year process of growing, seed collection, and growing again to select the most mildew-resistant plants that still keep their floral hop character. When the brewers are done, they’ll have a unique variety of hops that they can call their own — and hopefully grow more of, thanks to its improved mildew protection.

May 23, 2015

The rise of the Donair

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Food, Middle East — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I first experienced a donair in Halifax in the summer of 1982. I won’t claim it was a life-changing experience, but it was a revelation that “street meat” didn’t have to be awful. At The Walrus, Omar Mouallem explains how the humble donair is on the verge of conquering the streets of Alberta:

Like shawarma and gyros, donairs are a meaty delicacy shaved from a rotisserie spit and wrapped in pitas — only spicier and sweeter. If you require further explanation, then you’re from neither the Maritimes (where they were invented, in the 1970s) nor Alberta (where they’re most consumed). Topped with a sweet, creamy sauce, they are a Canadian take on tzatziki-coated beef and lamb gyros, which themselves are a Greco-American take on centuries-old Turkish rotisserie lamb (a dish that also spawned a blander German variant called döner kebab). Adding to the cultural confusion, most donair operations are run by Lebanese immigrants such as Tawachi — or my father, Ahmed Mouallem, who introduced Athena’s product to my hometown of High Prairie, Alberta, in 1995. The town of 2,666 now supports four different restaurants that serve the food, but only three traffic lights.

[…]

No one, including John Kamoulakos, who with his brother Peter invented the street food in Halifax, is quite sure how donairs migrated from east to west. Aaron Tingley of Tony’s Meats (based in Antigonish, Nova Scotia), a supplier that purchased the Mr. Donair trademark and recipe from Kamoulakos in 2005, thinks Maritime labourers might have driven Alberta’s demand: “They want to experience a taste of home.”

That’s what Chawki El-Homeira was thinking in 1978, when he left Halifax to chase the Alberta oil patch. Only he was going to feed the workforce. The sixty-seven-year-old remembers his first encounter with the donair, in March 1976, as if it were yesterday. He’d arrived in Nova Scotia from Lebanon with neither family nor English and got a job washing dishes in a restaurant that served the delicacy. “Something attracted me to it,” he tells me. “It was close to our food: it’s pita bread and spicy, quality beef, like shawarma. I thought, someday I’m going to open my own donair shop.”

After watching Maritimers migrate to Fort McMurray, he packed his bags and followed. The timing was terrible. The oil patch dried up in 1980, before he could secure a lease (like a true Albertan, he blames Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program). So he drove a cab instead, first in Fort Mac, then in Edmonton, looking for commercial vacancies while the meter ran.

On a fellow cabbie’s tip, he purchased a submarine-sandwich shop on Whyte Avenue in 1982 (the same year Tawachi opened his) and introduced his Dartmouth recipe to Albertans one slice at a time, offering customers free samples. Word spread of “Charles Smart Donair” (his anglicized name and a poorly translated Arabic adjective), and soon he had a monopoly as a supplier to other Lebanese shop owners. Then his best customer tried to copy his technique and, he claims, sabotage his business by spreading rumours to his predominantly Muslim clientele that he, a Christian, spiked his product with pork.

If anyone knows of a good donair place in Toronto’s financial district, feel free to drop a hint in the comments…

April 23, 2015

HMCS Iroquois to pay off on May 1st

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Royal Canadian Navy is shrinking again:

Maritime Forces Atlantic is encouraging all serving and retired members who have sailed aboard Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship (HMCS) Iroquois to RSVP to the paying off ceremony on May 1st in Halifax, Maritime Forces Atlantic states in a news release.

More from the Maritime Forces Atlantic news release.

Her Majesty’s Canadian Ships are a unique workplace in the Canadian Armed Forces. Crew members develop a connection to their ship as it can become their home for weeks and months at a time. HMCS Iroquois’ achievements over more than four decades symbolise the excellent workmanship and special comradery of her crews and is why we honour the Ship, her crew, and HMCS Iroquois’ valued service to Canadians.

HMCS Iroquois (DDG 280) at Port of Hamburg, near Övelgönne (via Wikipedia)

HMCS Iroquois (DDG 280) at Port of Hamburg, near Övelgönne (via Wikipedia)

March 19, 2015

The latest snowstorm in the Maritimes may have been the proverbial straw

Filed under: Cancon — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:52

If the reports from Nova Scotia are typical, the new ice age may have already started in the Maritime provinces:

March 7, 2015

22 Minutes: Halifax Tourism Ad

Filed under: Cancon, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 3 Mar 2015

The capital of Nova Scotia attempts to attract tourism by embracing winter’s reality.

March 2, 2015

Food naming oddities

Filed under: Cancon, Food, India, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

David Warren on the oddly named “Digby Chicken” and “Bombay Duck” along with a paean to the joys of food shopping in Parkdale:

Parkdale, which is to say, the inner core of the Greater Parkdale Area, in which the High Doganate is located, is a melting pot of innumerable overlapping ethnications. Among our most exotic immigrants are those from the far east: Nova Scotia, for instance, and Newfoundland. Shopping, at least for food in Parkdale, is a treat. We have every sort of specialist grocery, and in effect, groceries within groceries. One gets one’s Tibetan yak sausage, for instance, from a Serbian butcher whose store is cowboy-themed; ingredients for one’s Somali maraq from the Sinhalese grocery (via their Maldivian connexion); but the exhilarating, cardamom-infused gashaato instead via the Sikh Punjabis, as supplement to their Bengali sweets. Note, this culinary cross-dressing is the opposite of multiculturalism. Rather I would call it, “downmarket fusion.”

This being Lent, I try to avoid fish on Fridays. There’s enough of that for the other days, beans on rice will do, or perhaps sinfully on the last two Fridays, I indulged a craving for sweet potato in a Siamese red sauce. I woke this morning with a craving for salt, as well as protein, and as God is merciful, recalled to mind a little platter of Digby chicks in my fridge — obtained some days before from the Maritime ethnic section of a cheap local supermarket.

Digby Chicken has long been Nova Scotia’s answer to Bombay Duck. The latter, also salty, and so powerful in flavour and scent that it requires careful packaging, is actually a fish, the bummalo. Gentle reader may already be trying to construct an etymology from that, but there is no hope for him. The fish is actually harvested from the waters off Bombay. It was transported from there by rail, in the good old days of British Imperialism, aboard the Bombay Dhak (i.e. the Bombay Mail), which gave rise to such expressions as, e.g. “You smell like the Bombay Dhak.” Surely, that will be enough to go on.

January 19, 2015

The Cape Breton & Central Nova Scotia Railway shuts down operations

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Railways — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

In the Globe and Mail, Eric Atkins tells the tale of another shortline railway shutting down operations:

The railway, which did not reapply for a $3-million yearly government subsidy, has been granted permission by a Nova Scotia regulator to abandon the 100 miles of track between Port Hawkesbury and Sydney by October.

The move leaves some factories facing soaring shipping costs and scrambling to find new ways to bring in raw materials.

Beverage container maker Trans-Atlantic used to rely on the railway for 70 or 80 railcars a year carrying plastic pellets from Quebec and South Carolina. John MacLean, vice-president of the manufacturer that employs 40 people, said the railway raised the $600-per-car rate by $5,500 in the fall, and last week notified customers each car would cost $18,000.

“They obviously don’t want to do business here,” Mr. MacLean said by phone from Sydney. “They opted not to take the subsidy but they cited a decrease in traffic as the reason they had to increase the rate.”

The loss of rail service means Trans-Atlantic has been saddled with the expense of trucking its raw material from Moncton, and has lost the flexibility and storage the rail cars offered.

“We have to be very vigilant on the way we operate. It has a huge effect on our competitiveness,” he said.

[…]

Railway executives said at December hearings they did not renew the subsidy application because the future costs of maintaining and repairing the line outweighed the scrap and market value of the steel and other materials.

The railroad’s bridges and culverts would need repairs that cost at least $30-million, while the company figures it can get $15-million to $20-million scrapping and selling the rails and other material.

“As a company we feel that’s a much better use of our assets than simply operating on a subsidy that allows us to break even for 500 carloads a year. That’s why we did not renew,” said Josée Danis, assistant vice-president of Cape Breton & Central Nova Scotia Railway.

July 14, 2014

“Canada’s true sesquicentennial is happening right now”

Filed under: Cancon, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:12

In the Winnipeg Free Press, Allan Levine reminds us that not only is Canada’s 150th birthday coming up in 2017, but that the meetings that led to Confederation were being held 150 years ago and much of the success was due to a “forgotten father of Confederation”:

BOLSTERED by generous federal funding, the 150th anniversary of Confederation will be celebrated on July 1, 2017 with the great hoopla the birth of this country deserves.

Yet the hard work, political compromises, backroom negotiations and constitutional debates that made Confederation — a more remarkable development than we appreciate today — possible occurred during a five-month period from June to October in 1864.

In short, Canada’s true sesquicentennial is happening right now.

The two most notable events of 1864 were conferences in Charlottetown, in early September, followed by a more extensive one held in Quebec City for much of October. At the gathering in Charlottetown, delegates from the Province of Canada — divided into two regions, Canada West (Ontario) and Canada East (Quebec) — led by John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier, respectively, convinced politicians from the Maritimes a federation of all of British North America made sense. The fundamentals of this new constitutional entity were then hammered out in Quebec City, producing a comprehensive plan for a new country outlined in the 72 Resolutions, which became the basis for the British North America Act proclaimed on July 1, 1867.

Apart from Macdonald and Cartier, the other key political personality in Charlottetown and Quebec City involved in making Confederation a reality was George Brown, the publisher of the Toronto Globe. Born in Scotland, Brown had arrived in Toronto via New York City at the age of 24 in 1843 and a year later established the Globe. A large man, he was over six feet tall and powerfully built. Brown was hard and dogmatic, but also an energetic and passionate man with strong convictions about free speech, civil liberties and the separation of church and state.

Brown became a leader of the Reform movement in Canada West and rallied around him left-leaning Reformers in Toronto and western farmers he dubbed “Clear Grits” (this faction only wanted men of true grit). He was eventually elected to the Province of Canada assembly in 1851, the beginning of a journey that would culminate with his role as a leading Father of Confederation and a founder of the Liberal party.

Update, 15 July. Richard Anderson has more on George Brown, and neatly explains why of all the Fathers of Confederation, only Sir John A. sticks in anyone’s memory. Poor George founded the Liberal party, but wouldn’t recognize the party in its modern incarnation.

George Brown certainly founded the Liberal Party, The Globe and Canada as a viable nation state. The Liberal Party, however, would prefer if you not remember all that stuff. Like an unpleasant uncle whose Thanksgiving Day antics you have suppressed from conscious memory, Brown is an embarrassment to modern Grits. To understand that you only have to give glancing attention to the man himself.

Brown of the Globe was a classical liberal, or to put it another way he was real liberal, one who understood very well the root meaning of the word: Liberty. He denounced crony capitalism (see the Grand Trunk Railway), fought for the separation of church and state (see his attacks upon ultramonte Catholicism) and advocated for free trade. This fierce tempered, no-nonsense Scots-Presbyterian would have made mince-meat out of Pierre Trudeau and his dimwitted spawn. When the Liberal Party of Canada stopped believing in liberty they had no use for Canadian classical liberalism’s greatest exponent.

George Brown is more than forgotten, he is an orphan in our statist politics. We are much the poorer for it.

December 14, 2013

Canada edges ahead of the US in economic freedoms

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:12

Last week, the Fraser Institute published Economic Freedom of North America 2013 which illustrates the relative changes in economic freedom among US states and Canadian provinces:

Click to go to the full document

Click to go to the full document

Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille says of the report, “Canadian Provinces Suck Slightly Less Than U.S. States at Economic Freedom”:

For readers of Reason, Fraser’s definition of economic freedom is unlikely to be controversial. Fundamentally, the report says, “Individuals have economic freedom when (a) property they acquire without the use of force, fraud, or theft is protected from physical invasions by others and (b) they are free to use, exchange, or give their property as long as their actions do not violate the identical rights of others.”

The report includes two rankings of economic freedom — one just comparing state and provincial policies, and the other incorporating the effects of national legal systems and property rights protections. Since people are subject to all aspects of the environment in which they operate, and not just locally decided rules and regulations, it’s that “world-adjusted all-government” score that matters most, and it has a big effect — especially since “gaps have widened between the scores of Canada and the United States in these areas.” The result is is that:

    [I]n the world-adjusted index the top two jurisdictions are Canadian, with Alberta in first place and Saskatchewan in second. In fact, four of the top seven jurisdictions are Canadian, with the province of Newfoundland & Labrador in sixth and British Columbia in seventh. Delaware, in third spot, is the highest ranked US state, followed by Texas and Nevada. Nonetheless, Canadian jurisdictions, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, still land in the bottom two spots, just behind New Mexico at 58th and West Virginia at 57th.

Before you assume that the nice folks at Fraser are gloating, or that you should pack your bags for a northern relocation, the authors caution that things aren’t necessarily getting better north of the border. Instead, “their economic freedom is declining more slowly than in the US states.”

May 27, 2013

The economic and technical issues with domestic ship-building programs

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:44

The Royal Canadian Navy is supposed to be getting some new ships (eventually), at a proposed cost of $25 billion. But the best way to get the most bang for our buck is not the way the government is going about it … building these highly specialized vessels in Canada does two things: it guarantees that we’ll pay far more money for fewer hulls, and it briefly raises employment in certain fields (metalworking, electrical work, welding, etc.). What it doesn’t do is create a viable industry for building naval or coast guard ships for other countries — because most other countries can either build their own (France, Germany, the UK, and the US) or have the economic sense to buy from friendly countries that can build efficiently at reasonable cost. Even if we pay a significant premium to build frigates or destroyers in Canada, once that job is over the shipyards will close down and most or all of the workers will be looking for new jobs.

Michael Whalen has more:

Given the above, the second, far more strategic, issue to be discussed is: Should we in fact be building warships in Canada at all? What is the long-term benefit to Canada?

The immediate answer from politicians of all stripes is, interestingly, not great ships, but jobs, jobs, jobs. However, the jobs they are talking about may well be far less valuable than we imagine.

There is no standard breakdown of the costs of building a warship, but a recent study by the South Australian government (as part of its input to that country’s proposed 30-year, $250- billion naval shipbuilding strategy) suggests the actual shipbuilding represents much less than half of the cost of a warship, perhaps 30 per cent to 40 per cent.

The rest comes from the design, armament, engines, electronics, etc., which will largely be procured outside of Canada, certainly outside of Nova Scotia. The benefits to Nova Scotia and to Canada will be in largely blue-collar jobs such as shipwrights, welders, electricians and general labour. In a job-poor province such as ours, these are nothing to sneeze at. This massive expenditure will not, however, create a sustainable long-term industry for our province.

To put it bluntly, there is no market for Canadian-built warships. The major buyers, the Americans, the British, the French, the Chinese, etc., build their own. They will never buy a ship from Canada.

Our governments, federal and provincial, will spend billions establishing a small, inefficient industry for which there is no market outside the government of Canada.

There are economies of scale to consider: for a dozen ships, it makes no sense to essentially create an industry from scratch. For a hundred ships, the costs start to be reasonable (but we don’t need that many, couldn’t crew that many, and nobody will buy them from us). We have an infamous historical test of this, too:

There is something of a parallel here with the aircraft industry. John Diefenbaker has been condemned for nearly 60 years for cancelling the Avro Arrow, Canada’s last attempt at building a warplane.

In retrospect, he was right. Instead of spending billions on a jet for which there was no market, subsequent governments invested in companies like DeHavilland and Canadair (both ultimately purchased by Bombardier) and Pratt and Whitney Canada which focused on the growing market for commercial aircraft, particularly small airliners serving regional markets.

Today this country has a vibrant aerospace industry that is among the world’s largest. Canadian-built aircraft fly on every continent and jobs have been created across the country, including many here in Nova Scotia.

Large parts of this industry resulted from the identification of a sustainable, growing niche market (regional airliners) and investing in the components (e.g. airframe design, small turbine engines, landing gear) required to meet that demand. There is no evidence that kind of strategic thinking has gone into Canada’s shipbuilding program.

May 23, 2013

Underwater archaeologists revisit Louisbourg

Filed under: Cancon, France, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 16:29

Archaeologists are visiting Louisbourg harbour to inspect the remains of several French ships that were sunk during the second siege of Louisbourg in 1758:

Parks Canada’s underwater archeologists have been studying what remains of the ships in the waters off Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site since the early 1960s. For this dive, they are also gathering fresh, high-quality video and pictures for new exhibits and for a festival of all of Parks Canada’s archeologists to be held during Louisbourg 300 celebrations this summer.

Jonathan Moore of Parks Canada’s underwater archeology service said that after so many years on the ocean floor, what is left of the warships is mainly the remains of the lower hulls, which are embedded into the harbour bottom.

“You are not seeing a lot of structure above the sea bed,” he said Wednesday morning, after the five-person team returned to the wharf in Louisbourg. “A lot of the heavier materials located in the lower-most reaches of the ships are laying on the seabed.

“A common thing we are seeing is cannons that were on the warships when they went down: cannonballs, cannon shot, bar shot — all of the kinds of ordnance that was on the vessels when they sank.”

Some ship parts like some rigging, pulley components, stone and iron ballast are also on the ocean floor.

Underwater archeologists last visited the shipwrecks in 2008.

“We haven’t seen any dramatic change, which is a good sign,” said Moore.

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