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It’s all very familiar, in the most dispiriting way. So is the government’s response.

Much like with the Navy, now that the fleet is literally about to fall apart, the government has shown up with a plan. Justin Trudeau announced in Vancouver on Wednesday that the Coast Guard would receive 18 new ships. Two would be of the same class of Arctic patrol ships that the Navy will soon take into service. Sixteen will be a mid-sized multi-purpose ship that only exists right now as a gleam in a procurement ministry bureaucrat’s eye. The budget is a shade under $16 billion, but considering that the vast majority of the ships haven’t even been designed yet, let alone constructed, that number is barely a placeholder.

It's all very familiar, in the most dispiriting way

There’s a column to be written about the decision to build two more Arctic patrol ships and give them to the Coast Guard. The patrol ships are military vessels — lightly armed, but warships nonetheless. They’ll have the advantage of youth, relative to the rest of the Coast Guard fleet, but that’s it — they’re not suited to its specific needs. The only reason they’re being given to the Coast Guard is to keep the shipyard that builds them humming during an election year. The last thing the Liberals need in the months before an election when they’re down in the polls is to have Irving laying off a bunch of workers in the Maritimes. This is no way to run a Coast Guard, yet here we are.

And the prime minister is barely pretending otherwise. When announcing the new ships, he couldn’t stop gushing about all the jobs it would create. So many new jobs, in fact, that Canada will need to bring a third shipyard into the national shipbuilding program — Quebec’s Davie shipyard, of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman trial fame, seems to be in line for some sizeable federal contracts. Preserving the Coast Guard’s operational capabilities is a bonus — a meaningful one, even, but no more than that. It’s really about the jobs.