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[upbeat music] Welcome back to another episode of Vanguard Radio. I'm your host, Jay Richard Jones. Today, we're going to be talking about ship tech.
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We're gonna be talking about our show.
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We're gonna be bringing on a guest who's gonna tell us about some of the challenges that are involved in, in working with, uh, icebreakers and ice-capable vessel programs, and a whole lot more.
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Before I introduce our guest, I wanna tell you, before the show,
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we were just talking a little bit, and he said, "One of the challenges is that Canada is a world-class designer of ships, but yet the government doesn't recognize it enough." And I said, "Well, why do you think that is?"
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And he said, "Well, one of the issues is we don't toot our own horns enough." So please help me in welcoming to our show today Mr. Derek Buxton.
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He's Vice President of Business Development and Ottawa, and he is with Vard Marine Canada. Derek, welcome to our show. It's great to have you back. I kinda wanna jump right in here and then challenge you a little bit.
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What did you mean that Canada, the government doesn't recognize that we're world-class designers of ships? Oh, th-thanks again for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you.
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I think I'll start off by saying we don't do a really good job at tooting our own horn, as you've mentioned. But the challenge that we have is that Canada does indeed have world-class ship designers.
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In fact, there's a number of companies, not just our own, you know, part...
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companies like Robert Allan Limited in Vancouver, uh, and Genoa Design in, uh, Newfoundland and Labrador are a couple of examples who are having success on the world stage and who are world-renowned in the types of ships that they design.
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In the case of Robert Allan, it is tugs and harbor and pilot vessels. Um, they're the world standard.
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And in our case, we're a reference player in naval ship design, specifically offshore patrol vessel, light combatants, and now we have a growing portfolio and a success record on naval amphibious capability.
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And so it's not well-recognized, I don't believe, in Canada, that we actually have this expertise.
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In the case of Vard, who I'll speak to, right now we have six programs underway around the world, naval programs, that is, that are using ships designed by Vard Marine in Canada.
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And so I think raising awareness about the fact that we have world-class ship designers is important, particularly at this juncture as the government is considering what, uh, the National Shipbuilding Strategy, or NSS 2.0, looks like.
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Um, as I said before, we started the podcast here, NSS has been a fifteen-year work in progress, and it's still a work in progress, in my estimation, but it's made great strides.
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And it's done a very good job of catering to the shipbuilding side of the value chains and providing well-paid middle-class jobs for welders, pipefitters, crane operators, et cetera.
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But I think sh-ship design and engineering has been an after thought, or perhaps not even thought about, uh, at all, even though we have benefited from and have been quite actively involved in the NSS.
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So, too, have some of our competitors who we compete with on the world stage, and so we have scenarios where the government is licensing foreign designs, and so Canada doesn't own that IP, and we're not able to export that product.
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And so the River-class destroyer is a UK design, and the UK will export that, as they just have to Norway, um, as the next buyer of the Type 26. And the JSS is another example of a design license from Germany.
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Canada, again, won't export that, um, intellectual property.
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And so we're big proponents for making sure that Canadian taxpayer-funded programs cater to the entire shipbuilding value chain, not just the shipbuilding piece.
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And of course, a little bit biased in this view, but the shipbuilding value chain starts with ship design. You simply do not build a ship until it's been designed.
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And so if you do not covet and protect and develop your domestic ship design capability, then you'll be very, very hard-placed to claim that you have a, a strategic or a domestic shipbuilding capability absent that first and fundamental step in the process.
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I would think that makes a lot of sense. I wanna talk a little bit about icebreakers and ice-capable vessel programs.
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Can you share with us, what are some of the lessons that Vard Marine has learned from the past with icebreakers and the program itself?
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Icebreakers has been a mainstay of our company over our entire forty-three-year history. We, in fact, were created back in 1983, born out of a joint venture between a Canadian company and a Finnish company.
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And the first iteration of our company was known as Wärtsilä Arctic Marine Canada, and we've gone through several ownership iterations since then. We've been with Vard now since 2015,
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and we see no indication that's likely to change. This being the longest ownership arrangement that, that we've had.
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Uh, but we were born specifically in 1983 to chase icebreaker work, both governmental, with what was then the Polar Eight Program, and also in support of the oil and gas sector and the oil exploration work that was ramping up in the Beaufort Sea.
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And so our work in icebreakers has spanned that forty-three-year timeframe. And there's high barriers to entry into the icebreaker game, because it is a very specialized field.
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And so we o-overcame those and have maintained our expertise In that field over the years and have a very healthy reference list of ships we've designed and projects that we've been involved with in that domain.
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And in fact, if you look at the world's two most recent icebreaker deliveries, they were both designed by our company in Canada.
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And so that is the Arctic Offshore Patrol Vessel for Canada, for the Navy and the Coast Guard, which is obviously still ongoing with the two ships for the Coast Guard, and then delivered in December twenty twenty-four was the Almirante Viel for the Chilean Navy, which is their Antarctic icebreaker resupply vessel, which was awarded Icebreaker of the Year by Work Boat last year.
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And so we have the credentials. We've been involved.
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We designed the polar icebreaker for the Canadian Coast Guard, which is being built as we speak by Seaspan, and been involved in, uh, major programs in the US as well, including the Great Lakes icebreaker and the medium icebreaker, the US Coast Guard Cutter Healy.
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So we have a very strong pedigree. We've overcome those entry barriers to become competent icebreaker designers. Very few companies in the world have achieved that. And so we understand the nature of the game.
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The other thing that's really important is not just the ship design side of it, but it's understanding the environment in which these ships operate.
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And so ship ice interaction and the ice regimes that we see in the Canadian Arctic and in the Canadian South during wintertime, we leverage eighty years of ice data.
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We have tools that allow us to do voyage simulations through different ice regimes so we can simulate a specific design and structural arrangement in a specific location at a specific time of year, given the ice conditions that we would expect to see.
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And so while you may be really good at designing icebreakers, you may be more accustomed to doing it for the Russian Arctic or for the Baltic, which are entirely different ice regimes of what you see in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and certainly for what you see in the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence.
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And so there we can go into a little bit more detail on all of that, if you will, but our expertise is not just a pure ship design piece, but it's understanding how to design the ships to fit in the environment in which they intend to be operated, which is important as well.
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Yeah, I would imagine so, and I would imagine there's little room for error. [laughs] No, there isn't, and we've been involved in some industry firsts as well.
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And so if you look at what is the current international standard for polar class rules adopted by the International Association of Classification Societies, we played a major role in the development of that, and our company and people within our company specifically supported Transport Canada as flag state representative in development of the unified rules and the polar code.
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And so we've been at the forefront of, uh, of all of that work. We've done other things like worked with specific classification societies to develop new notations.
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And so as an example, the Arctic Offshore Patrol Vessel has a unique class notation as a patrol icebreaker, and that's something that we championed and advanced with Lloyd's Register.
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And we've also worked for class societies on computational methods such as finite, nonlinear finite element analysis.
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And I know that's very techy, but as a way and a methodology to validate the structural integrity of heavy ice class vessels, and that's now been adopted as the standard by the classification societies for assessing those structures.
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And so there's a few examples of things that we've been involved with which are not, um, germane to any given program, but part of the collective effort, if you will, with regards to advancing work in this domain.
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Oh, quite extensive. Looking ahead, how can the national shipbuilding strategy evolve a little better to support the innovation and exportable Canadian designs?
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I just think, as I said at the, off the top, that there's been a lot of good work done to support middle class blue collar jobs. We need to, I think, take a closer look at the white collar technical aspects of it.
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I know the shipyards have developed technical staff embedded in the shipyard. They're really there to support the latter stages of ship design, which is r- in our estimation, is not truly ship design, it's engineering.
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Um, and I don't necessarily want to get into a long, complex and arcane discussion about the four stages of ship design and, and what takes place in each of those.
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But in general terms, you have concept and basic design, which is really take, taking the user's end requirements and converging it into an integrated and optimized solution that looks like a ship and performs like a ship and can be used to demonstrate that you've met the user's end requirements.
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What happens in functional and detailed design is all working within that ship design to add detail when you select specific pieces of equipment and to draw out details so you can give the instructions to the shipbuilders to build the ship.
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But the fundamental aspects of ship design take place in the concept and basic design phase, and that's what we're good at.
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That's what we do many, many times each year and have done many, many times each year over a forty-three-year period.
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If you look at shipbuilding globally, the general rule of thumb is ship designers design ships, shipbuilders build ships.
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Many shipbuilders around the world see design as a necessary evil to get to what they want to do, which is sell production hours and produce steel.
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And so we have relationships with many shipbuilders around the world where they come to us for ship design, and we're delivering those around the world.
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And so the approach is slightly different here in Canada for a whole host of reasons.
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But I think an NSS 2.0, uh, needs to more closely look at the question of how do we develop, maintain, and sustain a leading innovative ship design capability in Canada. As I said, we have world-class ship designers
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In Canada that are succeeding on the world stage, and we need to continue to do that. And as is the case across the defense sector,
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you have a really hard time selling your equipment and your services internationally if you can't sell them at home.
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And so I believe that having some sort of a set-aside or some sort of a policy that looks to draw out the need to develop ship design is fundamental in the next iteration. Derek, I'd like to dig down just a little more.
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We touched on this a little bit, but what's the distinguishing kind of approach that Bard takes when they're doing icebreaker designs compared to a traditional model?
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Our approach, whether it's an icebreaker or a naval patrol vessel or an amphibious ship or even a commercial ship for a commercial client, is relatively consistent across the board.
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And how we differentiate what we do from what some of our competitors do is we will lean on our reference vessels and our past experiences to demonstrate that we're, uh, capable and competent in a specific ship type.
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But what we're not doing is trying to sell the next customer somebody else's design.
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And that's perhaps not as applicable in the commercial side as it is in the government side, because governments around the world are all different by virtue of their geography or where they operate, by virtue of the mandate they're giving, given through statutory and legislative requirements which differ.
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And so as an example, if you look at what the US Coast Guard is mandated to do versus what the Canadian Coast Guard is mandated to do, it's vastly different.
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You have to take the mandate of the Canadian Coast Guard, the RCMP, Canadian Border Services, Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and combine all of that to have the equivalent mandate to what the US Coast Guard does as an example.
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And so that's a long way of saying that somebody else's ship is not the right ship for the next customer.
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And if you accept somebody else's ship, then you must, uh, by extension, accept a compromise on your own unique requirements. And so that's where we see people falling into this trap. We want a proven design.
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Let's take the ship that was built for customer X. But then they realize that they don't want to compromise on some fundamentals, and so they inject change.
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And that's when these programs spiral and get into increased cost and schedule delays, and that becomes problematic. And so what we strive to do is we strive to offer
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ourselves, not as a company with proven designs, and we certainly have that, but as a company which is a proven designer with competence in a ship type.
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And let's talk to you about your unique requirements and maybe start with a baseline design, but take that down a path that creates a bespoke or a tailored solution that best meets your individual requirements.
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And so, as I said, that's the approach we take across the board, and it's particularly relevant in icebreakers because of all the things that I said earlier.
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The Canadian Arctic ice regime in the Canadian Archipelago is different.
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Indeed, it's different as whether you're operating in the high Arctic or in the Archipelago in the east or in the west of the Canadian Arctic, it's different.
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And so phenomenon like ice regime, landfast ice, pressurized ice, and the presence of first-year and multi-year old ice is very different in the Canadian Arctic.
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And so you, you necessarily need to look at tailored solutions.
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S-since Canada is producing world-class ships, and we want to promote that a little more, can you talk a little bit about some recent projects and some of the innovation and talent that has been involved in projects and that have been successful?
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We've been involved in a number of programs around the world, as you said, naval programs. One of the examples is we s- one of the three downselected designs for the US Navy's large uncrewed surface vessel program.
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And so through that, we've been able to leverage our expertise as ship designers and, more specifically, some of the innovation that we're doing, not just within Vard Marine, but within Vard Group more broadly when it comes to things like autonomous vessels, particularly topical for ship tech this year since we're hosting a panel about autonomous ships.
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And so we're able to leverage the innovations that have taken place in Europe, as an example, and apply those in a more narrowly focused sort of naval context, as we have done with the large uncrewed surface vessel program.
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And so that's a good example of innovation that's active right now and where we've been able to leverage some of our successes on the commercial side. Interesting. I want to move over to the vigilance proposal now.
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How has that changed since its early inception? That's not been intentional on our part to frame it as fait accompli, although obviously we're very biased towards a successful outcome.
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But in essence, it's a proposal from an industry consortium to the government of Canada for what has become known today as the Continental Defense Corvette program, which is now a program of record.
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They've gone through some of their approval milestones, and they've moved from project identification into options analysis.
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And we're continuing to have the dialogue with the government as our other proponents of other solutions. And that's obviously their view is that early days and there's no
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key decisions in terms of the direction of the program and indeed the funding and, uh, whether there is a preferred solution at this stage. And so I need to make that point upfront.
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But from us, from an internal perspective, we have really, um, our ship design is just what we do. We design ships that meet the customer's requirements, like spoken about bespoke and tailored solutions.
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And so as we've seen in the public domain, this discussion about the Navy's capability gaps, uh, has evolved from a replacement for the Kingston class, which is where we were originally with our pitch, uh, a seventy-five meter sub one thousand ton light ship vessel, which would, uh, be inserted into the fleet mix as a Kingston class plus.
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So not a commercial ship painted gray, but a bonafide military asset, has gone through several iterations, and those iterations have caused the requirements to drive the size and capability of the ship higher and higher.
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Where today it's, in my view, now articulated as a heavy corvette or a light frigate, and is more aptly described as a Halifax class minus.
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But again, still early days, and so there's plenty of opportunity for the governments and the Navy's thinking to evolve on this, and no doubt it will. But we look forward to how this does evolve.
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We think we have a, a very solid offer. We believe we're the only Canadian company from a design perspective that has a pedigree and track record in this type of ship,
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and therefore the only company that can do this without leveraging foreign-owned intellectual property.
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We can do it using baseline reference designs that are Canadian-owned intellectual property, and in turn generate new Canadian-owned intellectual property, which I think is a big feature here when you listen to the prime ministers, ministers, and the government writ large talk about defense investment as opposed to f- defense procurement.
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They want to spend tax dollars that's gonna have an enduring economic benefit, or the retention of Canadian-owned intellectual property, and the ability to market that for the next opportunity is critically important, and the ability to export it.
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And so, for example, Canada licensed a Type 26 global combat ship from BAE in the UK. Canada's not exporting the next sale of the global combat ship. The UK is, as they have just done with Norway.
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But if the Canadian Defense Corvette is designed in Canada and IP ownership r- is retained in Canada, then we absolutely could sell that design. We absolutely could sell the onboard fitted systems and equipment.
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We might be hard placed to sell turnkey ships because most governments wanna spend their tax dollars domestically in their own shipyards.
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But there are examples of countries that could be interested in something like the Continental Defense Corvette that do not have an indigenous shipbuilding capability or nascent shipbuilding capabilities, where there could be turnkey ship deliveries or lead shipped and knowledge technology transform follow ships built in that foreign country.
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And so this type of asset, I believe, is highly marketable internationally, and when you combine that with other nations looking
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well upon the opportunity to partner with Canada and the RCN, I think that's where we see this nexus of the Navy, the CAF,
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the Department of Defense, industry coming together and creating defense investments, spending Canadian tax dollars, and creating a return on investment.
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You know, it's interesting because there's so many changes going on in the world. We've talked a lot about some of the opportunities. But looking ahead, what do you see as some of the challenges?
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I mean, I think technology's an opportunity, but it's a challenge as well. But what do you see as the challenges looking ahead, and what's the plan to overcome them?
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I think most fundamentally, the challenge is global competitiveness. I mean, we can be globally competitive in ship design and engineering because we are successful on the world stage.
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I think we are competitive on systems and components.
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We have a number of companies who t- also happen to be part of our supply network on Team Vigilance, who have had success on the world stage selling their wares, whether it be the integrated platform management system by L3, the EC pins and the bridge systems by OSI Maritime, water making equipment by Blue Metric, or a Lockheed Martin, which is the most notable recent example, the sale of the CMS three thirty combat management system to Germany.
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And so we can be globally competitive and successful at those levels, but I don't think the shipbuilding and exporting turnkey ships is globally competitive given the prices that we're seeing in Canada today versus standard prices around the world.
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And if we have an industry which is solely dependent upon one customer, and that one customer being willing to spend, you know, many times more to go international price, then I think that is a key challenge that would have to be addressed.
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So productivity and efficiency is never gonna be where it needs to be to compete with China and Turkey,
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but we should aim to be, because their cost of labor is so much lower, but we should aim to be price competitive with Western European nations, as an example. And so I think that's gonna be a key piece moving forward.
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But all of the ecosystem that surrounds the shipbuilding piece can continue to be a viable global export, and if we can have those sales to our home customer, then that will greatly enhance our ability to have those sales and be successful with export.
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You know, Derek, lately Admiral Topchi has been quoted, I think, publicly talking a little bit about amphibious sea bases. Can you comment a little more about that? Absolutely.
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There has been some discussion in the public domain recently about the potential for Canada looking at an amphibious Arctic sea base capability.
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That's very exciting for us because that is one of our areas of expertise, is again, tooting our own horn, which we are accused often of not doing well enough.
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Right now, the Chilean Navy is building a four-ship program Of the landing platform dock, LPD, to our design. So ships that were designed by us here in Canada being built for the Chilean Navy.
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We also have small landing craft that, uh, we designed being built in the US.
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We have large landing craft to our design being built in Bangladesh for the Bangladesh Navy, and we've had a history of working on amphibious ship capabilities over our entire forty-three-year lifespan as a company.
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And ironically, for the very same reasons that we got into icebreakers on day one, we got into land-landing craft on day one.
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And so a lot of the early landing craft designs that we produced were in support of community resupply in the Arctic, uh, and in-industrial site resupply in the Arctic as well.
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So operations, moving equipment and supplies into remote austere locations. And so we've been very, very successful in that domain.
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We were recently in-invited to bid, uh, in a closed tender for a bid on a large landing craft for an allied nation that I won't na-name, but we have a very solid reputation.
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And so my point is that Canada does have world-class ship design expertise and perhaps in domains that people aren't aware of.
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We have a client also recently where we worked on a heavy ice class, polar class two, landing platform dock/helicopter, a large ship, which is exactly what may be being discussed right now as a potential type of ship as a Arctic amphibious sea base.
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And so we have that expertise proven. We've done it. We have programs underway that speak to our competence in that domain. That's fascinating. Sure. Thanks so much for sharing that. No problem. My pleasure.
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You have been listening to Vanguard Radio, and our special guest today has been Mr. Derek Buxton. He's Vice President, Business Development in Ottawa with Vard Marine.
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We've covered off icebreakers, we've covered off technologies, we've talked a lot about the National Shipbuilding Strategy and so much more. It's been really very interesting.
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If you want to learn more, Vard Marine is the silver sponsor at this year's Shipbuilding Forum twenty twenty-six, taking place February twenty-fourth in Ottawa.
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You won't want to miss this, and I can tell you, Derek, by the way, that show is absolutely sold out.
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I think it's the only one of its kind in Canada, and we certainly look forward to meeting with you and your team as well. Yeah.
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Well, looking forward to being there, and thank you very much for having me, and I'll look forward to the next opportunity to participate in Vanguard Radio. Thank you so much.
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[upbeat music] Welcome back to another episode of Vanguard Radio. I'm your host, Jay Richard Jones. Today, we're going to be talking about ship tech.
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We're gonna be talking about our show.
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We're gonna be bringing on a guest who's gonna tell us about some of the challenges that are involved in, in working with, uh, icebreakers and ice-capable vessel programs, and a whole lot more.
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Before I introduce our guest, I wanna tell you, before the show,
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we were just talking a little bit, and he said, "One of the challenges is that Canada is a world-class designer of ships, but yet the government doesn't recognize it enough." And I said, "Well, why do you think that is?"
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And he said, "Well, one of the issues is we don't toot our own horns enough." So please help me in welcoming to our show today Mr. Derek Buxton.
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He's Vice President of Business Development and Ottawa, and he is with Vard Marine Canada. Derek, welcome to our show. It's great to have you back. I kinda wanna jump right in here and then challenge you a little bit.
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What did you mean that Canada, the government doesn't recognize that we're world-class designers of ships? Oh, th-thanks again for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you.
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I think I'll start off by saying we don't do a really good job at tooting our own horn, as you've mentioned. But the challenge that we have is that Canada does indeed have world-class ship designers.
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In fact, there's a number of companies, not just our own, you know, part...
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companies like Robert Allan Limited in Vancouver, uh, and Genoa Design in, uh, Newfoundland and Labrador are a couple of examples who are having success on the world stage and who are world-renowned in the types of ships that they design.
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In the case of Robert Allan, it is tugs and harbor and pilot vessels. Um, they're the world standard.
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And in our case, we're a reference player in naval ship design, specifically offshore patrol vessel, light combatants, and now we have a growing portfolio and a success record on naval amphibious capability.
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And so it's not well-recognized, I don't believe, in Canada, that we actually have this expertise.
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In the case of Vard, who I'll speak to, right now we have six programs underway around the world, naval programs, that is, that are using ships designed by Vard Marine in Canada.
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And so I think raising awareness about the fact that we have world-class ship designers is important, particularly at this juncture as the government is considering what, uh, the National Shipbuilding Strategy, or NSS 2.0, looks like.
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Um, as I said before, we started the podcast here, NSS has been a fifteen-year work in progress, and it's still a work in progress, in my estimation, but it's made great strides.
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And it's done a very good job of catering to the shipbuilding side of the value chains and providing well-paid middle-class jobs for welders, pipefitters, crane operators, et cetera.
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But I think sh-ship design and engineering has been an after thought, or perhaps not even thought about, uh, at all, even though we have benefited from and have been quite actively involved in the NSS.
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So, too, have some of our competitors who we compete with on the world stage, and so we have scenarios where the government is licensing foreign designs, and so Canada doesn't own that IP, and we're not able to export that product.
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And so the River-class destroyer is a UK design, and the UK will export that, as they just have to Norway, um, as the next buyer of the Type 26. And the JSS is another example of a design license from Germany.
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Canada, again, won't export that, um, intellectual property.
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And so we're big proponents for making sure that Canadian taxpayer-funded programs cater to the entire shipbuilding value chain, not just the shipbuilding piece.
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And of course, a little bit biased in this view, but the shipbuilding value chain starts with ship design. You simply do not build a ship until it's been designed.
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And so if you do not covet and protect and develop your domestic ship design capability, then you'll be very, very hard-placed to claim that you have a, a strategic or a domestic shipbuilding capability absent that first and fundamental step in the process.
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I would think that makes a lot of sense. I wanna talk a little bit about icebreakers and ice-capable vessel programs.
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Can you share with us, what are some of the lessons that Vard Marine has learned from the past with icebreakers and the program itself?
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Icebreakers has been a mainstay of our company over our entire forty-three-year history. We, in fact, were created back in 1983, born out of a joint venture between a Canadian company and a Finnish company.
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And the first iteration of our company was known as Wärtsilä Arctic Marine Canada, and we've gone through several ownership iterations since then. We've been with Vard now since 2015,
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and we see no indication that's likely to change. This being the longest ownership arrangement that, that we've had.
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Uh, but we were born specifically in 1983 to chase icebreaker work, both governmental, with what was then the Polar Eight Program, and also in support of the oil and gas sector and the oil exploration work that was ramping up in the Beaufort Sea.
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And so our work in icebreakers has spanned that forty-three-year timeframe. And there's high barriers to entry into the icebreaker game, because it is a very specialized field.
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And so we o-overcame those and have maintained our expertise In that field over the years and have a very healthy reference list of ships we've designed and projects that we've been involved with in that domain.
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And in fact, if you look at the world's two most recent icebreaker deliveries, they were both designed by our company in Canada.
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And so that is the Arctic Offshore Patrol Vessel for Canada, for the Navy and the Coast Guard, which is obviously still ongoing with the two ships for the Coast Guard, and then delivered in December twenty twenty-four was the Almirante Viel for the Chilean Navy, which is their Antarctic icebreaker resupply vessel, which was awarded Icebreaker of the Year by Work Boat last year.
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And so we have the credentials. We've been involved.
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We designed the polar icebreaker for the Canadian Coast Guard, which is being built as we speak by Seaspan, and been involved in, uh, major programs in the US as well, including the Great Lakes icebreaker and the medium icebreaker, the US Coast Guard Cutter Healy.
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So we have a very strong pedigree. We've overcome those entry barriers to become competent icebreaker designers. Very few companies in the world have achieved that. And so we understand the nature of the game.
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The other thing that's really important is not just the ship design side of it, but it's understanding the environment in which these ships operate.
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And so ship ice interaction and the ice regimes that we see in the Canadian Arctic and in the Canadian South during wintertime, we leverage eighty years of ice data.
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We have tools that allow us to do voyage simulations through different ice regimes so we can simulate a specific design and structural arrangement in a specific location at a specific time of year, given the ice conditions that we would expect to see.
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And so while you may be really good at designing icebreakers, you may be more accustomed to doing it for the Russian Arctic or for the Baltic, which are entirely different ice regimes of what you see in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and certainly for what you see in the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence.
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And so there we can go into a little bit more detail on all of that, if you will, but our expertise is not just a pure ship design piece, but it's understanding how to design the ships to fit in the environment in which they intend to be operated, which is important as well.
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Yeah, I would imagine so, and I would imagine there's little room for error. [laughs] No, there isn't, and we've been involved in some industry firsts as well.
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And so if you look at what is the current international standard for polar class rules adopted by the International Association of Classification Societies, we played a major role in the development of that, and our company and people within our company specifically supported Transport Canada as flag state representative in development of the unified rules and the polar code.
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And so we've been at the forefront of, uh, of all of that work. We've done other things like worked with specific classification societies to develop new notations.
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And so as an example, the Arctic Offshore Patrol Vessel has a unique class notation as a patrol icebreaker, and that's something that we championed and advanced with Lloyd's Register.
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And we've also worked for class societies on computational methods such as finite, nonlinear finite element analysis.
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And I know that's very techy, but as a way and a methodology to validate the structural integrity of heavy ice class vessels, and that's now been adopted as the standard by the classification societies for assessing those structures.
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And so there's a few examples of things that we've been involved with which are not, um, germane to any given program, but part of the collective effort, if you will, with regards to advancing work in this domain.
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Oh, quite extensive. Looking ahead, how can the national shipbuilding strategy evolve a little better to support the innovation and exportable Canadian designs?
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I just think, as I said at the, off the top, that there's been a lot of good work done to support middle class blue collar jobs. We need to, I think, take a closer look at the white collar technical aspects of it.
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I know the shipyards have developed technical staff embedded in the shipyard. They're really there to support the latter stages of ship design, which is r- in our estimation, is not truly ship design, it's engineering.
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Um, and I don't necessarily want to get into a long, complex and arcane discussion about the four stages of ship design and, and what takes place in each of those.
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But in general terms, you have concept and basic design, which is really take, taking the user's end requirements and converging it into an integrated and optimized solution that looks like a ship and performs like a ship and can be used to demonstrate that you've met the user's end requirements.
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What happens in functional and detailed design is all working within that ship design to add detail when you select specific pieces of equipment and to draw out details so you can give the instructions to the shipbuilders to build the ship.
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But the fundamental aspects of ship design take place in the concept and basic design phase, and that's what we're good at.
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That's what we do many, many times each year and have done many, many times each year over a forty-three-year period.
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If you look at shipbuilding globally, the general rule of thumb is ship designers design ships, shipbuilders build ships.
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Many shipbuilders around the world see design as a necessary evil to get to what they want to do, which is sell production hours and produce steel.
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And so we have relationships with many shipbuilders around the world where they come to us for ship design, and we're delivering those around the world.
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And so the approach is slightly different here in Canada for a whole host of reasons.
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But I think an NSS 2.0, uh, needs to more closely look at the question of how do we develop, maintain, and sustain a leading innovative ship design capability in Canada. As I said, we have world-class ship designers
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In Canada that are succeeding on the world stage, and we need to continue to do that. And as is the case across the defense sector,
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you have a really hard time selling your equipment and your services internationally if you can't sell them at home.
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And so I believe that having some sort of a set-aside or some sort of a policy that looks to draw out the need to develop ship design is fundamental in the next iteration. Derek, I'd like to dig down just a little more.
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We touched on this a little bit, but what's the distinguishing kind of approach that Bard takes when they're doing icebreaker designs compared to a traditional model?
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Our approach, whether it's an icebreaker or a naval patrol vessel or an amphibious ship or even a commercial ship for a commercial client, is relatively consistent across the board.
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And how we differentiate what we do from what some of our competitors do is we will lean on our reference vessels and our past experiences to demonstrate that we're, uh, capable and competent in a specific ship type.
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But what we're not doing is trying to sell the next customer somebody else's design.
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And that's perhaps not as applicable in the commercial side as it is in the government side, because governments around the world are all different by virtue of their geography or where they operate, by virtue of the mandate they're giving, given through statutory and legislative requirements which differ.
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And so as an example, if you look at what the US Coast Guard is mandated to do versus what the Canadian Coast Guard is mandated to do, it's vastly different.
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You have to take the mandate of the Canadian Coast Guard, the RCMP, Canadian Border Services, Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and combine all of that to have the equivalent mandate to what the US Coast Guard does as an example.
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And so that's a long way of saying that somebody else's ship is not the right ship for the next customer.
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And if you accept somebody else's ship, then you must, uh, by extension, accept a compromise on your own unique requirements. And so that's where we see people falling into this trap. We want a proven design.
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Let's take the ship that was built for customer X. But then they realize that they don't want to compromise on some fundamentals, and so they inject change.
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And that's when these programs spiral and get into increased cost and schedule delays, and that becomes problematic. And so what we strive to do is we strive to offer
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ourselves, not as a company with proven designs, and we certainly have that, but as a company which is a proven designer with competence in a ship type.
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And let's talk to you about your unique requirements and maybe start with a baseline design, but take that down a path that creates a bespoke or a tailored solution that best meets your individual requirements.
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And so, as I said, that's the approach we take across the board, and it's particularly relevant in icebreakers because of all the things that I said earlier.
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The Canadian Arctic ice regime in the Canadian Archipelago is different.
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Indeed, it's different as whether you're operating in the high Arctic or in the Archipelago in the east or in the west of the Canadian Arctic, it's different.
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And so phenomenon like ice regime, landfast ice, pressurized ice, and the presence of first-year and multi-year old ice is very different in the Canadian Arctic.
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And so you, you necessarily need to look at tailored solutions.
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S-since Canada is producing world-class ships, and we want to promote that a little more, can you talk a little bit about some recent projects and some of the innovation and talent that has been involved in projects and that have been successful?
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We've been involved in a number of programs around the world, as you said, naval programs. One of the examples is we s- one of the three downselected designs for the US Navy's large uncrewed surface vessel program.
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And so through that, we've been able to leverage our expertise as ship designers and, more specifically, some of the innovation that we're doing, not just within Vard Marine, but within Vard Group more broadly when it comes to things like autonomous vessels, particularly topical for ship tech this year since we're hosting a panel about autonomous ships.
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And so we're able to leverage the innovations that have taken place in Europe, as an example, and apply those in a more narrowly focused sort of naval context, as we have done with the large uncrewed surface vessel program.
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And so that's a good example of innovation that's active right now and where we've been able to leverage some of our successes on the commercial side. Interesting. I want to move over to the vigilance proposal now.
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How has that changed since its early inception? That's not been intentional on our part to frame it as fait accompli, although obviously we're very biased towards a successful outcome.
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But in essence, it's a proposal from an industry consortium to the government of Canada for what has become known today as the Continental Defense Corvette program, which is now a program of record.
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They've gone through some of their approval milestones, and they've moved from project identification into options analysis.
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And we're continuing to have the dialogue with the government as our other proponents of other solutions. And that's obviously their view is that early days and there's no
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key decisions in terms of the direction of the program and indeed the funding and, uh, whether there is a preferred solution at this stage. And so I need to make that point upfront.
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But from us, from an internal perspective, we have really, um, our ship design is just what we do. We design ships that meet the customer's requirements, like spoken about bespoke and tailored solutions.
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And so as we've seen in the public domain, this discussion about the Navy's capability gaps, uh, has evolved from a replacement for the Kingston class, which is where we were originally with our pitch, uh, a seventy-five meter sub one thousand ton light ship vessel, which would, uh, be inserted into the fleet mix as a Kingston class plus.
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So not a commercial ship painted gray, but a bonafide military asset, has gone through several iterations, and those iterations have caused the requirements to drive the size and capability of the ship higher and higher.
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Where today it's, in my view, now articulated as a heavy corvette or a light frigate, and is more aptly described as a Halifax class minus.
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But again, still early days, and so there's plenty of opportunity for the governments and the Navy's thinking to evolve on this, and no doubt it will. But we look forward to how this does evolve.
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We think we have a, a very solid offer. We believe we're the only Canadian company from a design perspective that has a pedigree and track record in this type of ship,
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and therefore the only company that can do this without leveraging foreign-owned intellectual property.
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We can do it using baseline reference designs that are Canadian-owned intellectual property, and in turn generate new Canadian-owned intellectual property, which I think is a big feature here when you listen to the prime ministers, ministers, and the government writ large talk about defense investment as opposed to f- defense procurement.
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They want to spend tax dollars that's gonna have an enduring economic benefit, or the retention of Canadian-owned intellectual property, and the ability to market that for the next opportunity is critically important, and the ability to export it.
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And so, for example, Canada licensed a Type 26 global combat ship from BAE in the UK. Canada's not exporting the next sale of the global combat ship. The UK is, as they have just done with Norway.
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But if the Canadian Defense Corvette is designed in Canada and IP ownership r- is retained in Canada, then we absolutely could sell that design. We absolutely could sell the onboard fitted systems and equipment.
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We might be hard placed to sell turnkey ships because most governments wanna spend their tax dollars domestically in their own shipyards.
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But there are examples of countries that could be interested in something like the Continental Defense Corvette that do not have an indigenous shipbuilding capability or nascent shipbuilding capabilities, where there could be turnkey ship deliveries or lead shipped and knowledge technology transform follow ships built in that foreign country.
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And so this type of asset, I believe, is highly marketable internationally, and when you combine that with other nations looking
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well upon the opportunity to partner with Canada and the RCN, I think that's where we see this nexus of the Navy, the CAF,
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the Department of Defense, industry coming together and creating defense investments, spending Canadian tax dollars, and creating a return on investment.
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You know, it's interesting because there's so many changes going on in the world. We've talked a lot about some of the opportunities. But looking ahead, what do you see as some of the challenges?
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I mean, I think technology's an opportunity, but it's a challenge as well. But what do you see as the challenges looking ahead, and what's the plan to overcome them?
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I think most fundamentally, the challenge is global competitiveness. I mean, we can be globally competitive in ship design and engineering because we are successful on the world stage.
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I think we are competitive on systems and components.
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We have a number of companies who t- also happen to be part of our supply network on Team Vigilance, who have had success on the world stage selling their wares, whether it be the integrated platform management system by L3, the EC pins and the bridge systems by OSI Maritime, water making equipment by Blue Metric, or a Lockheed Martin, which is the most notable recent example, the sale of the CMS three thirty combat management system to Germany.
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And so we can be globally competitive and successful at those levels, but I don't think the shipbuilding and exporting turnkey ships is globally competitive given the prices that we're seeing in Canada today versus standard prices around the world.
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And if we have an industry which is solely dependent upon one customer, and that one customer being willing to spend, you know, many times more to go international price, then I think that is a key challenge that would have to be addressed.
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So productivity and efficiency is never gonna be where it needs to be to compete with China and Turkey,
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but we should aim to be, because their cost of labor is so much lower, but we should aim to be price competitive with Western European nations, as an example. And so I think that's gonna be a key piece moving forward.
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But all of the ecosystem that surrounds the shipbuilding piece can continue to be a viable global export, and if we can have those sales to our home customer, then that will greatly enhance our ability to have those sales and be successful with export.
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You know, Derek, lately Admiral Topchi has been quoted, I think, publicly talking a little bit about amphibious sea bases. Can you comment a little more about that? Absolutely.
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There has been some discussion in the public domain recently about the potential for Canada looking at an amphibious Arctic sea base capability.
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That's very exciting for us because that is one of our areas of expertise, is again, tooting our own horn, which we are accused often of not doing well enough.
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Right now, the Chilean Navy is building a four-ship program Of the landing platform dock, LPD, to our design. So ships that were designed by us here in Canada being built for the Chilean Navy.
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We also have small landing craft that, uh, we designed being built in the US.
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We have large landing craft to our design being built in Bangladesh for the Bangladesh Navy, and we've had a history of working on amphibious ship capabilities over our entire forty-three-year lifespan as a company.
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And ironically, for the very same reasons that we got into icebreakers on day one, we got into land-landing craft on day one.
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And so a lot of the early landing craft designs that we produced were in support of community resupply in the Arctic, uh, and in-industrial site resupply in the Arctic as well.
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So operations, moving equipment and supplies into remote austere locations. And so we've been very, very successful in that domain.
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We were recently in-invited to bid, uh, in a closed tender for a bid on a large landing craft for an allied nation that I won't na-name, but we have a very solid reputation.
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And so my point is that Canada does have world-class ship design expertise and perhaps in domains that people aren't aware of.
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We have a client also recently where we worked on a heavy ice class, polar class two, landing platform dock/helicopter, a large ship, which is exactly what may be being discussed right now as a potential type of ship as a Arctic amphibious sea base.
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And so we have that expertise proven. We've done it. We have programs underway that speak to our competence in that domain. That's fascinating. Sure. Thanks so much for sharing that. No problem. My pleasure.
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You have been listening to Vanguard Radio, and our special guest today has been Mr. Derek Buxton. He's Vice President, Business Development in Ottawa with Vard Marine.
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We've covered off icebreakers, we've covered off technologies, we've talked a lot about the National Shipbuilding Strategy and so much more. It's been really very interesting.
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If you want to learn more, Vard Marine is the silver sponsor at this year's Shipbuilding Forum twenty twenty-six, taking place February twenty-fourth in Ottawa.
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You won't want to miss this, and I can tell you, Derek, by the way, that show is absolutely sold out.
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I think it's the only one of its kind in Canada, and we certainly look forward to meeting with you and your team as well. Yeah.
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Well, looking forward to being there, and thank you very much for having me, and I'll look forward to the next opportunity to participate in Vanguard Radio. Thank you so much.
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