The commander of the navy says there’s no reason — in circumstances outside of war — to arm Canada’s fleet of coast guard ships.
And Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee tells CBC News that in the event of a conflict, there are potential ways the civilian vessels can be quickly given the equipment they need to defend themselves.
The question of whether the integration of the coast guard into national defence has painted a target on the civilian agency is something that has preoccupied Parliament for months.
“In a wartime scenario, where we think there’s gonna be an attack on Canada, I think we take a look at everything and we try and figure out what to defend,” Topshee said in a recent interview.
The navy’s top commander, Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee, spoke to CBC’s Murray Brewster about whether the Canadian Coast Guard could defend itself in a crisis. Topshee said that in a wartime scenario, ‘I think we take a look at everything and we try and figure out what to defend.’
“I don’t see any real reason to go through fundamentally changing the character of the coast guard and arming it, unless there’s a compelling reason to do so.”
The Liberal government announced the merger last spring and it’s mostly been viewed through the fiscal lens of how it helps Canada meet its NATO defence spending targets.
Parliament is also in the throes of debating legislation that will give the coast guard an expanded mandate for surveillance of the country’s coastline and more powers to share intelligence with the military. Bill C-12 has passed the House of Commons and is now before the Senate.
Canada is the only Arctic nation that doesn’t arm its coast guard fleet.
In testimony before the Commons defence committee last fall, the commissioner of the coast guard, Mario Pelletier, said his ships and crews are not out there looking for a fight and don’t intend to be in areas where they might find one.
“Right now we’re not looking at defending [ourselves], because we’re not looking at being in a theatre where there would be confrontation,” Pelletier testified last October.
“We’re looking at occupying a space that can be occupied and where we can collect information and pass it on to our colleagues at [the Department of National Defence] DND.”
Pelletier said the general expectation is that the coast guard would be defended by the navy if it came under attack.
Surveillance and intelligence collection is, however, risky. The federal government and NATO allies are going through a major militarization in the Arctic, citing challenges from Russia and China.
Rob Huebert, a defence expert at the University of Calgary, said it’s not just the United States, Russia and China that arm their coast guards. New Zealand, Norway, Finland and Sweden do as well.
If an adversary wanted to do harm, he said, they wouldn’t recognize the difference between a Canadian ship painted red and white and one painted battleship grey.
“Just go to the South China Sea and see. Look at the way the Chinese use the coast guard and … the [People’s Liberation Army Navy] vessels. They use them indistinguishably,” Huebert said.
Growing number of confrontations
Over the last two years, globally there has been an increasing number of high-seas confrontations involving the coast guard ships of various nations, particularly in the South China Sea.
The most intense incidents involved the China Coast Guard (CCG) and the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG), with multiple collisions reported in March, June and August 2024.
“If your enemy uses their weapon systems in a certain way, they will automatically think you do the same thing,” said Huebert.
Conservative MP Jeff Kibble publicly challenged the coast guard commissioner over the current policy on two occasions during committee hearings last fall.
In the current global context, he suggested it didn’t make sense.
“You’re searching for a threat in your role as surveillance and security, you have no capability to deal with it and then you would just leave and hand that over to the navy, even if they’re not there,” Kibble said.
“What value-add are you going to bring to military surveillance and security operations if you’re going to be leaving at the sign of a threat?”
Footage released by the Philippine coast guard shows multiple collisions between one of its ships and one of China’s in the South China Sea. China’s coast guard said a Philippine ship that was illegally stranded lifted anchor and ‘deliberately rammed’ a Chinese vessel. The Philippine coast guard said a Chinese vessel ‘intentionally rammed’ one of its ships.
Huebert said the coast guard has always jealously guarded its civilian role and there’s been little appetite — then and now — within the federal government to look at changing it.
“There’s never been a political desire to have the discussion on what the coast guard does,” Huebert said. “The coast guard does their job admirably, and then we forget about it. The political discussions occur once in a while during a crisis.”
And that pretty much seems to be the way Canada will continue to approach the subject.
During the Second World War, Topshee said, Canada took to arming merchant ships, but in a careful, selective way where the weapons stayed under the control of the military.
In today’s context, he suggested it wouldn’t be much different.
“If we ever felt that they needed a defence capability, then there’s ways to put that capability on by using naval personnel,” Topshee said.
“The navy has a history of being able to put capability — weapons — on board ships and that leaves us being the experts in weapons handling, weapons management rather than the coast guard developing that capability. But ultimately these are government decisions.”
One potential solution in a crisis, Topshee added, would be to install a modular containerized defence system on coast guard ships, similar to the ones the navy’s lightly armed Arctic offshore patrol vessels can carry. Essentially, it involves dropping a sea container with a sonar array and perhaps other defensive systems on the back of a ship.
Under the DND umbrella
Both Canada’s military operations commander and the top U.S. general in charge of the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), in separate interviews with CBC News, said they are pleased to see the integration of the Canadian Coast Guard with the Department of National Defence, particularly in the Arctic.
“It’s going to increase our situational awareness,” Lt.-Gen. Steve Boivin said late last year.
“We’ve got good awareness by domain right now. When we think maritime, air, land, space, cyber — our challenge is to integrate that. And having the Canadian Coast Guard as part of the Department of National Defence will allow us to have additional sources of information to build a complete picture.”
Separately, U.S. Gen. Gregory Guillot described the Canadian government decision as “advantageous” to NORAD.
“It gives us more maritime presence. It gives us more maritime warning. More is always better,” Guillot said in a recent interview with CBC News.
During testimony last fall before the Commons defence committee, senior Canadian defence officials took pains to point out that the coast guard will remain outside the military chain of command — despite the integration.
“There are also no plans to militarize the coast guard or assign it an enforcement role,” said Natasha Kim, an associate deputy minister of national defence.
“I’d like to underscore that the Canadian Coast Guard remains a civilian special operating agency. Importantly, the coast guard reports to the deputy minister and not to the chief of the defence staff.”
The coast guard and the military are now going through the process of figuring out how to add secure communications equipment to the civilian ships in order for them to be able to report what they see.
