I’m a big fan of Dan Gardner’s work. A couple of years ago he wrote an essay called Preparing for the Next Big One, and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since. He describes what he calls the “tombstone mentality,” the cycle of complacency that drives how societies prepare for foreseeable disasters. It goes like this:
Stage one: A threat is foreseen. When and how it will strike isn’t known but that it will, sooner or later, is clear.
Stage two: We do little or nothing.
Stage three: The threat strikes. Lives are lost. Our failure to prepare is bemoaned. We prepare for the next time the threat strikes.
Stage four: Time passes. Memories fade, and the sense of threat with it.
Stage five: Although the threat is as real and inevitable as before, preparedness lapses. Return to Stage One.
It’s a brutal description of how we prepare only after the fact, then slowly forget why we prepared in the first place. Gardner’s examples range from pandemics to tsunamis to reinforced cockpit doors. The pattern is depressingly familiar.
That’s usually how Canada approaches preparedness. We wait until it’s too late.
After the Cold War we fell right into Stage Two when it came to naval shipbuilding. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet navy rusted at anchor, and we convinced ourselves it was the “end of history.” World peace would be the new normal, right? After mostly being mothballed in 2000, our main Naval Shipyard, the Saint John Shipyard, finally closed in 2003. Other facilities went quiet, and the entire idea of Canada as a country with sovereign naval shipbuilding capacity faded from memory. If trouble ever came, we told ourselves, we could always buy what we needed abroad.
What an embarrassingly naïve take.
Surprisingly, we corrected that mistake in 2011, and we didn’t wait for World War III to do it. The government set out to reestablish warship construction capacity in Halifax. It hasn’t been cheap, and it hasn’t been easy. But it was, and remains, the right call. Because for once Canada broke Gardner’s cycle. We didn’t wait until Stage Three. We didn’t wait for disaster to strike. For once, we actually started to build the Ark before it rained.
And today the wisdom of that decision couldn’t be clearer.
The threat of nuclear war or a serious global conflict hasn’t been this high since the height of the Cold War. Don’t take my word for it. Look around. Russia’s grinding away in Ukraine and openly flirting with attacking NATO countries. Just yesterday, the Prime Minister of Poland said that we were “…the closest we have been to open conflict since World War Two”. Peace in the Middle East? Forget it. China’s turning out warships at breathtaking speed and rehearsing blockades of Taiwan. And remember, Taiwan’s no ordinary island. Beyond it’s cultural connection to China, it’s also the linchpin of the new global economy. Nearly all of the world’s most advanced semiconductors are made there, the chips that power smartphones, artificial intelligence, and modern weapons systems.
If we thought the supply chain for ventilators during the pandemic was fragile, then Taiwan’s dominance in advanced semiconductors is fragility on an entirely different scale. A cutoff of Taiwan’s chips would threaten the entire global economy, military readiness, and future of technologies all at once.
Which brings us back to shipbuilding. There’s no off-the-shelf in warship construction. These aren’t consumer goods. They aren’t iPhones you pick up in a store. And they aren’t commercial ships either.
It’s tempting to point to icebreakers or other large civilian hulls and say: look, if we can buy or build those quickly offshore, why not surface warships? But that’s a false comparison. An icebreaker is essentially a commercial grade vessel - steel, hull, propulsion. A surface warship is a combat system at sea. The bottlenecks aren’t really the hulls but the sensors, weapons, combat management software, and quieting technologies that must all be integrated. Those don’t exist in commercial supply chains, and no container-ship yard is set up to deliver them.
And unlike commercial ships, surface combatants are evolving at breakneck speed. A generation ago they were built around big guns. Today they’re defined by missiles, and tomorrow’s could carry lasers or swarms of aerial drones. The River Class Destroyers Canada is preparing to build will start with advanced missile systems, but by the time the last hulls are laid down, entirely new technologies may be standard. That pace of change is something you’ll never see in an icebreaker or a freighter.
Even the parts that look similar, like steel, hull fabrication, and propulsion, don’t translate directly. A surface combatant’s hull is designed for survivability under fire, for stealth signatures, and for the integration of combat systems. That’s not the same as building an icebreaker or freighter to carry containers across the Pacific.
Commercial shipbuilding is relatively easier. Speed and cost in shipbuilding come from scale and predictability. That’s why commercial shipyards, with their simpler designs and broad supplier networks, can turn out container ships quickly and cheaply. Surface combatant construction is a different game. Each vessel is tailored to a navy’s needs, packed with sensitive systems, built under strict security, and dependent on a fragile, highly specialized supply chain where one missing critical component can delay the entire build by months or even years.
With the exception of submarines, even if Canada wanted to buy its navy abroad today, it couldn’t. Our allies’ naval shipyards are almost at full capacity. Our closest friends are pouring resources into their own fleets. Their governments are prioritizing their own orders, as they should. There are no spare slots. No quick purchases. No easy imports.
At best we’d be waiting years, paying more, and ending up with vessels designed for someone else’s navy. At worst, we’d be told to get in line indefinitely.
Submarines are an exception. They aren’t optional, we need them, and we need them soon. Canada doesn’t have the luxury of taking a decade to stand up a new submarine yard. Fortunately, there are two hot production lines today in Germany and South Korea, that do match our timelines. But that only proves the point: surface combatants aren’t in the same position. There are no spare lines, no open slots, no off-the-shelf solutions.
That’s the uncomfortable truth behind the easy talking point that Canada should just buy our frigates or destroyers offshore. There’s nothing to buy. There are no shelves.
And that’s why the 2011 decision to restart naval shipbuilding in Halifax is so significant. For once Canada avoided the tombstone mentality. We didn’t wait for the crisis. We rebuilt capacity before the shelves were bare.
Yes, domestic warship construction has been expensive. But it’s not simply procurement. It's an industrial strategy. It’s sovereignty. It’s resilience. It’s the decision to ensure that when the world is most dangerous, Canada isn’t standing in line at someone else’s shipyard, begging for a slot that will never open.
We got it wrong after the Cold War. But this time we acted before it was too late. Maybe we’ll show the same foresight in other areas of national resilience.