What does canada want with obsolete 20-30 year old OBERON-class british submarines? Is canadian sovereinty being compromised?
Or, are shipping lines prepared to use the NW passage? Are the submarines intended to back up Canada’s claims to that waterway?
I don’t see the point of equipping your navy with old , obsolete diesel-electric subs…canada has the money…go nuclear!
Since when does Canada spend anything on its military? 
(I hope they get those guys out. 
)
It’s an Upholder class sub. The RN went all nuclear and we picked up (apparently off the floor) a number of diesel subs.
What no snickers about the damn dents in the things!?
Yeah it’s pretty sad. I’m Canadian and I am in sull support of our government spending more money on military.
My buddy is a captain in the army and I have heard him talk about how it sucks not to have enough money to certain things (more live fire drills, ability for Canada to transport their own vehicles, etc.).
These subs are lemons, I remember watching a show where there was a reporter going out on the first trip on our first “new” sub. When they went to submerge water came pouring in from the coning tower, the seal on the hatch was shot!
One is in dry dock being retro-fitted, now this one has had an electrical fire!
Does anyone know if any of these subs are deployed in the pacific yet? Or if there are plans to have them there?
At least we bought some decent destroyers a few years ago.
MtM
I think we built the frigates.
On the other hand it cost the British about 2 billion to build these 4 boats and we’ve spent about 700 million to buy them. I mean they sink well enough, it’s coming back up we’re having problems with.
So I guess the Great Fear that we were going to be invaded by the ravening Canadian Hordes was a bit overstated? I mean, it looks like the average US Cub Scout troop spends more on its weapon systems than the whole Canadian Government does on theirs! 
All very sad - one of the guys has died en route to hospital and more rescuers are still trying to get to the sub. The weather isn’t helping much.
And now we’ve lost a crewman.
The British-built Oberon class subs that Canada was equipped with since the 1960s were well and truly at the end of their operational lives. The subs that we bought from Britain were 90’s vintage Upholders, not 60’s vintage Oberons. So we had to decide to either:
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get out of the submarine game entirely (not practical, when your Navy’s main competency is convoy escort and ASW).
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go nuclear, and buy some ex-Los-Angeles class boats from the U.S. (not a chance in hell given the current defence budget). The cost of refuelling the boats, plus the cost of running a nuke school, are prohibative.
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“buy” some relatively new. modern diesel-electrics from Britain, that had just mothballled the Upholders in favour of a nuke force.
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buy somebody else’s diesel-electrics: Germany? Russia? China? Not likely.
So the Upholders were the best of a bad situation. It does seem that the refit program has gone badly; this suggests that the Upholders were never seaworthy in British service.
But eventually, we will have some relatively stealthy, deadly subs for training and exercises with Allies. There were enough Oberon class periscope pics of carriers to make a skimmer captain nervous; I suspect the Upholders will eventually give Nimitz drivers fits.
I just don’t get it. What does canada need submarines FOR? Escorting Spanish trawlers out of the “no fishing zones”? Convoy escorts to baffin Island? I mean, even operating a small fleet of diesel-electric submarines costs a lot of money…a buch of long distance patrol aircraft would provide as much utility, at a much lower cost.
^They’re deadly anti-drug boats… one of them is stationed in Esquimalt and the other three are in the Atlantic.
I was sorry to hear one of the sailors died. I guess it really is bad luck to rename a ship.
A sub can stay on station for 40 days. With no one the wiser. That and along with the frigates they form a reasonable ASW force the the northwest Atlantic.
I know this is an incredibly stupid question, but how exactly does a fire break out on a submarine anyway? Cooking, smoking, what?
It was an electrical fire near the batteries was what I read. There’s wiring, insulation, oxygen, grease, diesel fuel, food etc. etc. on a submarie, or any boat/ship for that matter.
That is a valid question, that deserves an answer, because it’s not immediately apparent. I will assume it was posed in earnest, not just rhetorically.
There are a number of reasons why Canada needs subs:
The biggest advantage of a submarine is that it combines the stealth of a high flying aicraft with the long time presence of a naval vessel. Our current maritime patrol aicraft, the Aurora, (loose equivalent to the US Orion P3) has a flight time of 12 hours or so before running our of gas and having to return to base. Plus, even at high altitude, they can still be spotted. They can leave condensation trails, they still make noise, and they are still obligated to have navigation lights at night. Plus, you can’t immediately launch a boarding party from an aircraft…
Destroyers and cost-guard cutters are quite visible, even at considerable distance, to any ol’ tub that has the basic set of maritime radar and electronics that are practically essential if you operate in the grand-banks, with all that fog…
A sub can patrol an area weeks at a time, and with modern hydro-accoustic gear, can determine passively, without any active sensor transmissions, the type of vessel, their speed and bearing, and also often what activitities the vessel may be conducting: trawling, line fishing, launching small craft, etc.
Another factor to consider is that stealth acts as a force multiplier. If the bad guys (drug runners, people smugglers, illegal fishers etc.) know that Canada uses subs to partrol, that they can’t detect them, and that they may be around, they can’t operate as openly and as freely as they could otherwise, even if they can’t see or hear anything at the moment. Think of the analogy of a city police department making the announcement that they will be switching from having only marked police cars doing traffic enforcement to also having unmarked cars, photo-radar, and red-light cameras. Given the scarcity of Canadian Naval and Maritime patrol assets, even a few subs can make a big difference.
One of the unsung advantages of “modern” diesel-electric subs, and in particular the “Upholder” class which Canada bought, is that they are extremely quiet. Even more quiet that the average nuke boat. This is because a battery & electric motor drive is so much quiter than all those pumps, impellers, valves, etc. required to run a nuclear reactor for propulsion. The american Sea-Wolf class boats are probably as or more quiet, but you could probably buy a flotilla of diesel-electric boats for the cost of one of those. So our boats would excell at both engaging other unknown subs in our waters, as well as proving to be very difficult targets for ASW training of our NATO partner navies.
Then you get into possible active (not training) Nato commitments. Because of the stealth force-multiplier effect and their capabilities in general, subs are excellent at enforcing naval blocades and deterring vessels from attempting to run naval blocades (remember the General Belgrano?). Say if the situation in North-Korea deteriorates, and Nato / the UN? (Ha, unlikely) decides to impose a naval blockade. A few Canadian destroyers or frigates wouldn’t have the impact that one or two subs would. This could be a chance for Canadan to make a real, as opposed to token, contribution. The Persian Gulf and Indian ocean blocades on which Canadian naval vessels are / were recently (I’m not sure if it’s over) employed is a good example.
Another scenario is suppose some Pacific island nation, or part of one, say one of the states of Indonesia or Malaysia, becomes / declares itself an Islamic fundamentalist republic. In addition to the blockade scenario, say they decide to launch suicide boat strikes againt all traffic on important shipping lanes. A submarine would be invaluable in tracking & identifying the supporting bases/vessels from which such strikes would be launched…
Hope this helps.
Does Canada currently use subs for enforcement actions against these bad guys, or are you speaking of the future?
Oy… I don’t think the older “Oberon” class Canada had (I’m not sure if we had even 2*) could enforce against too many Geese in a pond. They were barely post WWII vintage… Thye have been junked for 6 years now. Geez, I have to take my hat off to those guys who were crazy enough to go down in those…
No, I was speaking of the future…
*When Canada’s West-Edmonton mall was opened, it was the first (and still only, AFAIK) “Mega-Mall” in the country. It’ the same scale as the Mall of America in Minnesotta. It had an attraction of a big fish tank with 4 “submarines” that are basically in / under water train-ride cars. The long-running joke what that that mall had more subs than the Canadian Navy.
At least now they’re evenly matched… 
Y’all had three that actually deployed – HMCS Ojibwa, Okanagan and Onondaga (I visited the Okanagan once). They were 1960s models, refurbed in the 80s, and actually purchased new, rather than bought second-hand after retirement from the RN.
Do your school teachers talk about how it sucks that there isn’t enough money for basci school supplies?
Mainly so you don’t have to rely on someone else , when you really do need them.
Next , is that if you disband the submarine force , you lose alot of man years worth of experience that can’t be replaced overnight , just by buying brand new subs and manning them with surface sailors.
As military assets against second and third rate powers , the diesels are not that bad of a deal , but against a first rate military ,they are nothing more than mobile minefields, but they can show the flag , attract new people to the Forces , that are not otherwise interested in the normal navy.
The Upholders are getting a lot of bad press , but most of the problems seem to be the way that they were put into the inactive list by the Brits , and once they get the teething problems worked out , they should provide lots of years of stellar service.
Declan