Canada’s top sailor says he’s sure we could stop Russia or China from trespassing in Arctic

Canada’s top sailor says he’s confident our navy can stop Russia or China if they send ships through the strategically vital Northwest Passage without asking for permission.

“We wouldn’t need the allies to come to our aid. We could deal with it ourselves,” said Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee.

“We have the capacity to deploy our ships up there right now to stop them.”

The country’s new Arctic and offshore patrol ships only carry a 25-mm cannon, but Topshee said that could quickly be supplemented with other weapons.

“They’re not intended to be front-line combatants,” Topshee said of the warships, dubbed AOPS (Arctic and offshore patrol ships). “They have everything they need for the missions that we anticipate that (they’ll) do. Were we to get into a wartime environment where we felt … they could come directly under threat, then there’s the capacity to install other weapons in sort of an ad hoc manner — very similar to how you would defend an army forward operating base.”

During an interview Sunday at the Halifax International Security Forum, which focused heavily on Arctic sovereignty, as well as Russia’s war in Ukraine, Topshee was quick to point out neither Russia nor China has gone through the Northwest Passage without first getting Canada’s blessing.

“It would be really nice to believe that Russia would comply with international order, but their illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine tells us that they have no interest in complying with international law and I can’t trust anything Russia does until they withdraw from Ukraine and restore the full territorial integrity of Ukraine,” he said.

“Until that changes, we’re not going to trust Russia with anything and we’re going to regard them with great suspicion and make sure we monitor everything they do.”

But it’s not worth the expense of adding more weapons to the AOPS now because the threat doesn’t warrant it, he said. “On both coasts we’re experimenting to make sure that these ships would have legitimate wartime roles if they needed to.”

On the east coast, the navy is focused on making sure the Arctic and offshore patrol ships have a full suite of mine counter-measures.

“The ship itself will never go into a minefield — 7,000 tons is not the type of thing you put into a minefield. But is a perfect platform for all of the sensors and effectors that you would deploy into a minefield to find the mines and disable the mines, working in concert with our clearance divers.”

On the west coast, the AOPS are more focused on anti-submarine warfare. The navy’s experimenting now with towed arrays that can detect submarines from thousands of kilometres away.

“That way you’ve got a ship that’s not got the weapons to defend itself, but it’s looking for a submarine that’s so far away the submarine doesn’t even know it’s being hunted,” Topshee said, noting the ship could feed information to the Royal Canadian Air Force to help it attack the sub.

While arrays can’t be towed in ice, he said the navy is eyeing sensors that could be rapidly deployed on the ocean floor and autonomous vessels that can patrol for submarines under the ice and report back quickly on what they find.

While the navy’s keen to use the Harry DeWolf-class ships to hunt subs, they still can’t embark with Cyclone helicopters.

“Right now, it’s got a hangar, it’s got a flight deck — that’s the easy part,” Topshee said. “The complicated piece is that, in order to be able to land that helicopter on the deck, secure it on the deck and then bring it into the hangar — there’s a couple of changes that have to be made.”

Canada plans to purchase 12 modern, non-nuclear submarines to replace four diesel-electric subs acquired from Britain. Topshee hopes to see the first of the new sub fleet operating early in the next decade.

Their mission: “leaving Esquimalt Harbour, sailing up through the Aleutians, the Bering Strait, into the Beaufort Sea, patrolling for 21 days and then returning home and doing the entire thing submerged and undetected.”

The challenge will be finding crews willing to head north repeatedly.

“Sailors love going to the Arctic the first time. They see Northern Lights, they see polar bears, they see ice. It’s fantastic,” Topshee said.

“The unfortunate thing is, that’s all it is, all the time. And, so for many of them, it’s like ‘OK, this is getting old.’”

That’s why the navy is sending its Arctic and offshore patrol ships south after spending summers up north.

“The Margaret Brooke next year is going to circumnavigate South America and will likely be the first Canadian navy ship (to) visit Antarctica,” Topshee said.

Topshee was surprised when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau mused recently that the new subs could be nuclear-powered.

Canada explored the idea twice, in the 1960s and 1987, but cost and the U.S. refusal to share some technology made the scheme “not viable,” according to Topshee.

The navy’s “already twenty per cent short of the personnel we require” and nuclear subs would require about six times as many people to sail and maintain as conventional subs, he said.

“In a perfect world, where I’m unconstrained by resources and I have every sailor I required in the navy and a bigger navy, I would absolutely look to see whether or not nuclear submarines would make sense, but those are the preconditions to even be able to imagine considering it.”

Canada’s navy is paying close attention to how Ukraine has successfully used drones to attack Russian warships.

“Everything we see the Ukrainians doing in the Black Sea — we are taking a look at that and saying what of that is relevant to us? How do we make it work? And then, more importantly, at the same time, how do we counter it? So, if we can figure out a way to defeat a ship with a drone, we also want to be able to make sure that we ourselves can defeat that drone because we know our adversaries are going to use it against us,” Topshee said.

The drones Ukrainians “have used very effectively to attack the Russian fleet in Sebastopol … look a lot like the drones that we’ve been using for targets,” he said. The navy has employed Hammerhead drones for about 15 years to simulate incoming targets.

“So, could we take that same thing and instead of using it to test our own ability to fire, load it full of explosives and send it in?”

However, weather and communications problems can make it tough to operate drones in the Arctic, Topshee said.

“Can it really manage down to –40 C?” he said. “Battery performance tends to go downhill quite quickly in all those environments…. A lot of our stuff is very, very brittle. How well can you manipulate this stuff wearing heavy mittens and gloves?”

The navy has taken delivery of four of the Harry DeWolf-class warships, number five is in the process of being commissioned into service, and the sixth one will be launched in the coming weeks at Irving Shipbuilding’s Halifax yard. The Canadian Coast Guard is also in line for two of the vessels.

Topshee calls those icebreakers, though he concedes they’re not heavy icebreakers.

“They break four-and-half feet of ice,” he said. “They operate across the Arctic (with) incredible capability that we use to make sure we have full control (and are) aware of everything that’s happening in the Arctic. We can execute sovereignty and security functions anywhere we go, and the threats are growing. China’s in our Arctic every year. Russia is routinely in the approaches to our Arctic. We are seeing an increase in shipping through the Arctic.”

What we are lacking, Topshee said, is heavy icebreakers that can operate up north in the middle of winter.

“That’s the capability that we really need to make sure that … there’s never any challenge to our sovereignty or security — that we can go there even in the worst of weather conditions.”

Topshee doubts the Northwest Passage will ever become a major shipping route. If anything, recent ice changes linked to climate change make it more unpredictable to navigate than ever before, he said.

“The Arctic gyre works in a counterclockwise manner. It piles up old ice inclusions on the western approaches to the Arctic. And because the … ice extent is quite low, it’s much more unpredictable where the old ice will wind up and it can wind up complicating passages.”

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