Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/653616
l lanD VEHICLE www.vanguardcanada.com FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016 13 t he Canadian Army fights from a world class Light Ar- moured Vehicle built in Canada by a Canadian com- pany. Purchased in the mid-1990's, their manufacturer General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada (GDLS-C) is now in the middle of a major upgrade that will extend their ar- moured vehicle's useful life for another two decades. This domes- tic industrial capacity and the word class, made-in-Canada equip- ment it provides to our military would not exist if that company was unable to export its vehicles elsewhere in the world. This fact has been largely lost in the controversy over the com- pany's multi-billion dollar export deal to Saudi Arabia. The deal doesn't just benefit the company, it will bolster the domestic de- fence industry and the country. While the Saudi deal is atypically large, unusual for the degree of public discussion and somewhat unique in that it represents the sale of a complete vehicle, rather than a subsystem or component, in many ways it highlights the dynamics of the Canadian defence industry as a whole. non-traditional export markets International exports account for roughly half of the Canadian de- fence industry's work, the bulk of which involves the sale of com- ponents, subsystems, software or services into international supply chains. Historically, most sales have gone to the United States, by virtue of Canada's privileged access to that defence market, with a secondary focus on traditional allies, such as NATO members. Given the recent budgetary pressures in those countries, most of which posses robust, government-supported industries of their own, Canadian firms have been looking to non-traditional markets for new sales, including in the Middle East. Without exports, many Canadian defence firms could not stay in business. Canada's purchase of defence goods is simply too in- frequent, with decades passing between major Canadian defence purchases. And as a recent report points out, even when the Cana- dian government does launch new efforts to acquire equipment, the majority of these projects recently have been delayed. The in- frequency of domestic orders makes it difficult to sustain a viable business, let alone one that produces cutting edge technology. In the case of GDLS-C, in between sales of a few hundred vehicles at a time to the Canadian Army, it has exported thousands of others to international customers.