HMCS Windsor, one of Canada's Victoria-class long range patrol submarines, returns to port in Halifax in 2018. Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press
Luc-André Brunet is a senior lecturer in contemporary international history at the Open University and director of the LSE Ideas Peace and Security Project at the London School of Economics.
Facing mounting criticism for failing to meet the NATO defence-spending target of 2 per cent of the GDP, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has announced the planned acquisition of up to 12 under-ice capable submarines to patrol the Northwest Passage and the broader Arctic region.
Wait, sorry – what’s that feeling I’m having? It must be déjà vu.
Allow me to recall: The year is 1987. After years of criticism for failing to meet the NATO defence-spending target, the Canadian government has decided to try to bolster its credentials among allies by acquiring up to 12 submarines, to patrol Canada’s Arctic waters.
It’s true – what Mr. Trudeau is hoping to accomplish now is a path well-trodden by former prime minister Brian Mulroney. The current PM may wish to consider the historical parallels, to apply some hard lessons from Canada’s past.
By the time Mr. Mulroney came to power in 1984, NATO allies had long grumbled that Canada was routinely the second-lowest spender on defence within the Alliance; only Luxembourg spent a lower share of its GDP on defence. While Mr. Mulroney had pledged to improve Canada’s relations with its allies and increase its spending, documents at the Reagan Presidential Library reveal our allies were nonplussed. In March, 1987, then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan was briefed that Mr. Mulroney had “done little to increase [Canada’s] abysmally low defence spending or to modernize the armed forces,” concluding that the U.S. was “disappointed in Canada’s performance.”
In June, 1987, Ottawa unveiled a plan to acquire up to 12 nuclear-powered submarines. The hefty price tag – running into tens of billions of dollars – would address allied complaints about Canada’s chronic underspending. Yet the Americans were unconvinced that this was a sensible financial commitment, with then-deputy national security adviser Colin Powell warning Canada’s then-ambassador to the U.S., Allan Gotlieb, that the submarines “would become a major financial drain.”
For the Canadian government, the acquisition was promoted domestically on two central justifications: security and sovereignty. Given the heavy Russian military presence in the Arctic Ocean, the submarines were sold as a guarantor of security from a potential Soviet incursion. But, intriguingly, the government was ambiguous on another source of such a concern: Two years earlier, the U.S. icebreaker Polar Sea had travelled through the Canadian Northwest Passage without requesting permission to do so, prompting an angry response among many Canadians. (While Canada considers the Northwest Passage to be internal Canadian waters, the U.S. position remains that it is instead an international waterway.)
The chief political appeal of acquiring the submarines was thus in its implicit defence of Canadian sovereignty from the Americans. While the Mulroney government was concluding negotiations with the United States over a controversial free-trade agreement – which then-Liberal leader John Turner memorably claimed would turn Canada into “a colony of the United States” – the plan to acquire the submarines was politically useful.
This emphasis on sovereignty did not go unnoticed in Washington. Newly declassified documents from Library and Archives Canada disclose that the U.S. Department of Defense complained to Ottawa that “the subs were more a response to the perceived threat posed to Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic by the U.S.” than to the Soviet threat, describing the policy as “inherently anti-American.”
In April, 1989, having defended the planned acquisition of the submarines for nearly two years, the Canadian government abruptly reversed course. As the government tried to reduce a ballooning deficit, it announced cuts to the national defence budget totalling nearly $3-billion, including the scrapping of the costly submarines. The British archives reveal that the U.K. government – from whom Ottawa had been planning to buy the submarines – described the volte-face as “a major disappointment.” Paradoxically, a plan that was intended to improve Canada’s reputation instead confirmed negative assessments of our reliability, and strained relations with key allies.
Several factors explain the abandonment of the Canadian submarine program. A worsening financial situation was an important reason, as was the declining threat posed by the Soviet Union by the twilight of the Cold War. Perhaps most importantly, the issue of sovereignty had largely been resolved by the spring of 1989. In 1988, Canada and the U.S. signed an Arctic Co-operation Agreement that determined U.S. icebreakers would only pass through the Northwest Passage with Ottawa’s consent. With the Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement successfully entering into force in January, 1989, the Mulroney government had less need to demonstrate its commitment to Canadian sovereignty.
What lessons, then, does this earlier plan to acquire submarines for the Canadian Arctic hold for the current government?
First, Canada must be clear-eyed about the financial commitments involved in acquiring a fleet of submarines. With the vessels expected to cost upward of $120-billion, Ottawa should remember the reputational damage incurred if it were to progress with the program only to eventually commit an about-face.
Second, the issue of sovereignty should not be underestimated. With the return of Donald Trump to the White House alarmingly likely, defending our sovereignty in the Arctic has obvious appeal. Yet any perceived anti-Americanism in the plan would aggravate bilateral relations with Washington.
One lesson from 1987 does seem to have been learned already: perhaps the most controversial aspect of Mr. Mulroney’s project was that the submarines would be nuclear-powered. Against the backdrop of the nuclear arms race of the early 1980s and the deadly Chernobyl disaster of 1986, many Canadians mobilized against the prospect of nuclear subs in Canadian waters. Today, with the continuing attacks on Ukraine, led by a Russian President who regularly threatens to use nuclear weapons, Ottawa has sensibly stressed that the new submarines would be not nuclear, but conventionally powered.