Snowbirds should keep soaring over Canada
Another tragic loss of life has rocked our nation. With the crash of one of the Royal Canadian Air Force’s (RCAF) Snowbirds Tutor planes, which killed Capt. Jennifer Casey, there have been renewed calls to ground our Snowbirds for good.
Our Snowbirds have been a Canadian icon for the last 50 years. Their mission is to showcase the “skill, professionalism and teamwork” of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) as a whole. Essentially, they are a public relations and recruitment tool for the CAF and specifically RCAF.
What happens when an intended positive public relations tool becomes a deterrent to recruitment and thus negating the intended mission outcome? We are supposed to take pride in our Snowbirds. They’re something we look to the skies and become inspired by. With a history of crashes, including two in the last eight months, that inspiration is seemingly fading.
The annual cost to operate and maintain our Snowbirds team, including 80 personnel, is around $5 million. It’s a rather low cost considering the returns they give in national pride and public relations. The national defence annual budget for advertising alone more than $5 million. Seeing our RCAF in action is certainly more inspiring than a 30-second blurb on television or a brochure.
In the 2017 season alone our Snowbirds had 154 requests to perform, only being capable of accepting 64. There is a demand for our Snowbirds because there is an immense value in their public relations efforts. They offer a close-up experience and exposure to our CAF and RCAF like no other.
The overall safety of the current Canadair CT-114 Tutor jets our
Snowbirds use should certainly be questioned. The planes, despite constant maintenance and rebuilding, are still aging. There has been talk of replacing the Tutors for decades now. In fact, they were set to be retired in 2010. A 2003 report suggested there was increasing technical, safety and financial concerns and recommended the planes be replaced immediately.
Despite several reports and warnings, the idea to replace the fleet was pushed back in favour of extending their life to 2020. The likely scenario is that the life of the Tutor jets will have to be extended further to 2030 after a replacement is chosen and purchased at an expected cost of $700 million to $1.5 billion. By then, that would put some of these jets at a technical age of 67 years old.
The problem comes down to the cost to replace the planes and the political will to do so. Some see our Snowbirds as a luxury over that of the necessity they have become. It speaks to the greater issue of military spending in Canada as well which has seen declines across the board.
Promised defence spending of $8 billion alone in fiscal 2017-18 and 2018-19 was slashed by the Trudeau Liberals. Procurement continues to be an issue such as the troubled Cyclone which replaced our 50-year-old CH-124 Sea Kings in what was labelled the worst procurement in the history of Canada signed by the Paul Martin Liberals in 2004. A Cyclone was recently involved in a deadly crash off the coast of Greece.
We call ourselves peacekeepers while we fail to support our men and women in uniform by providing them with the proper, up-todate equipment they need to do their jobs safely and effectively let alone taking care of our veterans. With the economic uncertainties moving forward from COVID-19, there will be further troubles when it comes to defence spending.
This should not be the end to our Snowbirds though. I call them ours because they are. They are part of all of us. Should we persevere through tragedy or succumb to it altogether? The hope and inspiration they have offered of the last 50 years should not fade so quickly from our memories.