Joint Support Ship cost up by $1.1 billion - taxpayers will now spend $3.4 billion on project

On the same subject

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  April 8, 2020 | Local, Aerospace, C4ISR

  CAE answers the federal government’s call to procure ventilators

  The federal government has launched an accelerated procurement plan with several Canadian companies, including Montreal-based CAE, to procure up to 30,000 ventilators. “Canadian companies are answering the call to protect our health care professionals with made-in-Canada solutions,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a statement on Apr. 7. “This is exactly the kind of innovative, collaborative thinking we need to respond to this rapidly evolving pandemic.” CAE is best known in the aerospace sector for aircraft simulators and training services, helping train over 150,000 pilots per year worldwide. But for more than a decade, the company has also made a name as a healthcare training solutions provider for colleges, universities and hospitals and for medical equipment manufacturers. That includes patient simulators that respond to treatment, including intubation and ventilation. “We have the [medical] and engineering expertise in house – electrical, mechanical, software and human physiology,” said Erick Fortin, director of engineering at CAE Healthcare. A team of 12 engineers took up a challenge issued on Mar. 21 by the Montreal General Hospital Foundation and McGill University Health Centre to develop a simple and low-cost ventilator. Within 10 days, they had a working prototype built with parts from around the lab. “It worked quite well,” said Fortin. “It showed how you can put a team together with the right experts ... and what we can do.” For a company that on Apr. 6 announced the temporary laying off of 2,600 of its 10,500 employees and reduced work weeks for another 900, the opportunity “to do something” has been rewarding. “The whole company is mobilized,” he said. “We are really prepared to produce and we are productizing.” From that initial team of a dozen engineers, the project now has about 100 employees involved. And CAE expects to pull in more as they move to full production. CAE might not be the only company in the Montreal aerospace cluster seeking to solve the ventilator shortage. According to industry think tank Aero Montreal, Pratt & Whitney Canada is also exploring how to use its engineering and manufacturing capabilities to design and validate a ventilator concept that would likely “pull on local manufacturing,” including from Bombardier and AON3D. Fortin said CAE had received “hundreds and hundreds” of emails from companies interested in supplying components, from valves to flow sensors. Though all options are under consideration, including having several contingency plans at the ready, the priority would be to find Canadian suppliers who can deliver high volume. “Some parts are a bit more complex to source, like valves. We'll look at all offers, at all suppliers that can help,” he said. “We are confident that we have everything we need. We certainly have the expertise in house to do the production of thousands of ventilators.” CAE must still fine-tune the prototypes, but it intends to deliver about 10,000 units within three months once it starts production. A low-cost solution might have been part of the engineering team's initial objective, but Fortin admitted the final price might be higher than a typical commercial ventilator. “We try to build it as low as possible,” he said. “As you can imagine, as time is of the essence, cost will be a bit higher that what it could be with a bit more time.” CAE will also be leaning on its training expertise to ensure the final product comes with a complete operator training package. Since mid-March, in fact, the company has been offering online re-skilling courses for ventilators and has released a number of COVID-19 scenarios on its current products such as patient simulators. Fortin noted that more than 2,000 health professionals had participated in coronavirus-related webinars “After 25 years at CAE, I am always surprised at how nimble a big company like this can be, and how we can adjust to different situations,” he said. In its statement on Apr. 7, the government said that about 5,000 Canadian companies have offered expertise and capacity to develop and produce medical personal protective equipment, hand sanitizers and other protective gear. The government is also “working through over 22,000 submissions to Public Services and Procurement Canada from companies interested or able to sell to Canada. All efforts are being made to secure contracts and deliveries as quickly as possible.” “In mobilizing industry and creating partnerships, we are moving swiftly to build up a secure domestic supply of key personal protective equipment to protect Canada's frontline health workers as they fight this pandemic,” said Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry. https://www.skiesmag.com/news/cae-federal-governments-call-procure-ventilators/

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  December 18, 2024 | Local, C4ISR, Security

  Ursa Major tests long-range rocket motor for Army as firm eyes growth

  Ursa Major said it developed this solid rocket motor from scratch and brought it to test in four months.

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  October 9, 2018 | Local, C4ISR

  String of radar stations in Canadian Arctic nearly obsolete — and modernizing them will cost billions

  David Pugliese, Ottawa Citizen The radar sites detect potential threats entering North America's airspace and transmit a stream of data to military command centres in the south CAMBRIDGE BAY, Nunavut — The white domes that rise from the tundra look innocuous enough, and yet they play a critical role in protecting millions of Canadians and Americans thousands of kilometres away. Inside, where photographs are forbidden, they are like a time capsule from the late 1980s, the décor still reflecting the late Cold War era when the Canadian and U.S. governments established the North Warning System, the chain of mostly unmanned radar sites of which the Cambridge Bay facility is a part. Spanning Canada's northern coastline across the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Labrador, the radar sites exist to detect potential threats entering North America's airspace, transmitting a stream of data to military command centres in the south. At the Cambridge Bay site, dozens of civilian contractors — employees of Raytheon Canada — work around the clock to keep the installation operating in temperatures that can dip to -60 C in January or February. At times during the winter, Arctic storms almost completely cover some of the sites in snow, requiring contractors to climb through hatches in the roofs of the buildings to conduct maintenance work. But the North Warning System now faces a threat greater than the harsh Arctic environment. In seven years the radar system is expected to be obsolete. The Canadian and U.S. governments are trying to figure out how to upgrade the radars for modern times — opening the door that the sensors could be plugged in to the Pentagon's missile defence system as well as be modernized so they can track a new generation of Russian cruise missiles. Canada and the U.S. are trying to figure out technological improvements for the early warning system and are in the midst of discussions on the topic. A joint study on continental defence is expected to be finished by next year, Department of National Defence spokesman Dan Le Bouthillier told Postmedia. “Following the completion of the study, Canada and the United States will determine the next steps for the replacement of the NWS and update the project timelines accordingly,” he added. But that could emerge as yet another point of contention between Canada and the Trump administration in the U.S., which has already admonished Canada for not spending enough on defence. The last time the U.S. and Canada modernized the radar system was during the tenure of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, when relations between the two nations were on a solid footing. “Negotiating with the Trump administration is going to be a lot different than with the Reagan government,” explained defence analyst Martin Shadwick. “Trump will be the wild card.” Shadwick said details about funding and what the radars need to do in the future could become sticking points. The Liberal government has recognized it has to do something about what it calls the capability gaps in the North Warning System. “While the current NWS is approaching the end of its life expectancy from a technological and functional perspective, unfortunately the range of potential threats to the continent, such as that posed by adversarial cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, has become more complex and increasingly difficult to detect,” the government's defence strategy, released last year, pointed out. But the Liberals did not include funding for the modernization of the NWS in that policy, saying it would come later. Canada is currently responsible for 40 per cent of the cost of the North Warning System, with the remaining 60 per cent falling to the Americans. Canada owns the sites and provides the site operations and maintenance while the U.S. owns the radar and radio equipment. Ernie Regehr, a senior fellow in Arctic security and defence at The Simons Foundation, has found that while the cost for upgrading the North Warning System is unknown at this time it can be expected to run into the billions of dollars. Canada and the U.S. share the responsibility for a credible contribution to the defence of North America, Regehr pointed out. “And the American definition of credible is the one that counts,” he wrote in a March briefing for the Simons Foundation. Full article: https://nationalpost.com/news/modernizing-warning-radars-in-the-arctic-will-cost-canada-and-the-us-billions-of-dollars