In 1998, Canada announced that it would be purchasing four used Upholder submarines from the Royal Navy to replace its aging Oberons.  

Canadian submariners breathed a sigh of relief. The end of the Cold War had raised doubts about the wisdom of investing in weapons that no longer seemed relevant to many Canadians. Worse, a fiscal crisis had added to defence cuts that were already underway in pursuit of a “peace dividend”.  

The Upholders would be a “life raft” for the service to keep it alive long enough until a new submarine class could be afforded.

Twenty-eight years later, Canada has finally committed to a brand-new class and again the navy’s submariners are again breathing a sigh of relief.  The Victoria class has been highly problematic with only a 30 per cent availability rate, causing significant problems in maintaining effective professional skills in what is one of the most demanding occupations in military service.  

The question that presents itself at this point is whether the 12 new German Type 212CD submarines will solve Canada’s submarine problem, or make it worse?  

Many of the problems affecting the Victoria submarines can be traced to the fact that they are an “orphan class” – the only four boats in existence, abandoned by their “parent navy” once sold to the RCN.  

With only four of twelve planned boats, industry lost interest in keeping open production lines for spare parts requiring Canada to recreate expensive supply chains.  But was this the only problem affecting the Victorias?

Submarines are among the most complex forms machinery humans employ.  The environment in which they operate is inherently dangerous; the space limits aboard vessels means components are tightly piled atop one another, making maintenance highly difficult; and the switch from analog to digital technology further complicated maintenance as anyone trying to repair their own car today has discovered. 

Managing this technological complexity was made all the worse by the challenge of finding spare parts as well as by the small engineering staff managing these efforts in both the RCN and DND’s Material Group.  Maintenance delays contributed much to the low availability rates.

If these practical matters weren’t already challenging enough, the history of the boats is marked by bad luck.  “Butterfly effects,” common to complex systems, occurred regularly beginning with the length of time it took Canada to make up its mind to purchase the submarines.  

The RN could not actually sell their boats to any but Canada given the amount of American technology embedded within their systems. Nor could they afford to keep maintenance crews on them once they had been decommissioned.  

Kept in salt water, the material conditions of the boats declined significantly between 1994 and their reactivation in 2000.  This lengthened the amount of time to bring them back into service.  

Crews spent years waiting for their submarines to become ready as a variety of defects were addressed by the British. The RCN hadn’t planned for this when it abruptly decommissioned the Oberons in 1998 to send all its crews to Britain for conversion training.  

Secondly, the fire aboard HMCS Chicoutimi removed her from service for a decade, complicating the efforts to develop the plans for regular operations and maintenance, and further limiting opportunities to train the skills necessary for underwater warfare.

Thirdly, as the submarines began to arrive in Halifax, the local navy yard was fully engaged in preparing the surface fleet for Operation Apollo in the Gulf of Oman.  This delayed the installation of Canadian equipment on board the submarines, including the Mark48 torpedoes, but also mundane yet critical modifications to bring the boats up to North American electrical voltages. 

Arguably, limited training culminated in the grounding of HMCS Cornerbrook in 2014 due to navigational errors – skill fade that had been highlighted by RCN studies on submariner qualifications as far back as 1993 and as recently as 2010.

“High Reliability Organizations”, such as aircraft carrier decks, nuclear plant operation rooms, and air traffic control centres have all been studied by organizational sociologists for decades.  They are resilient to the “normal accidents” that occur in complex systems as they expect failure, speeding up response and recovery.  It is clear that the Victoria era was not one of “high reliability”, but will it have been a learning experience for transforming the Canadian Submarine Service into one?

While the procurement of twelve modern boats is a promising step forward to restoring the capabilities Canadian submarines were providing at the close of the Oberon era, there will be an ongoing risk of continued failure unless the RCN makes investments in its shore establishments, especially the Maritime Equipment Programme Management group, and the Fleet Maintenance Facilities on either coast.  

Unless Canada invests in a robust supply package from TKMS, lack of spare parts will continue to bedevil availability rates.

The current uncertain international environment has made massive increases in defence spending politically popular.  This may be challenged by equally massive spending requirements in health care and other social services caused by an aging population.  There is no guarantee that the eye watering costs to support a modern submarine service will remain “affordable” under such circumstances.  Without expensive support, a distinct possibility remains that our twelve new submarines spend as much time alongside as the current Victorias.