David Astbury's skill set is anything but cookie-cutter.
The 44-year-old British engineer started his career working at Jaguar, Aston Martin and Land Rover.
“That's where I fostered my systems engineering skills,” he said.
His globe-trotting career has included working on aircraft carriers for engineering giant BAE Systems in Spain and naval frigates in Australia.
Astbury now works as manager of electrical systems at Seaspan, one of dozens of senior engineers hired by the North Vancouver shipbuilder in the past few years.
The company had to look outside of Canada to find people with the right skills and experience. It has found most of those employees in the United Kingdom and United States.
“If we had to hire from the local market here, there hasn't been enough shipbuilding activity in Canada to produce the experienced candidates for us,” Seaspan president Brian Carter told Business in Vancouver.
The dearth of local talent results from a 20-year lull in the industry, caused by the decline of Canadian shipbuilding after the federal government stopped subsidizing shipyards in the 1980s, according to Roland Webb, a senior project director with Vancouver ship design company Robert Allan Ltd.
“Historically there was government support of shipbuilding that went on from the end of World War II to 1985, and then they cut that program,” he said.
“When they eliminated it, a lot of shipyards closed.”
During that 20-year period, the shipbuilding industry changed. Many companies started to outsource to countries like Turkey, Singapore and China, where labour costs are lower. Today, Robert Allan Ltd. gets many of its tugboats built in Turkey, a country with a long history of shipbuilding.
Canada isn't alone in letting its boat-building skills slide: Australia is in a similar situation, Astbury and Webb said.
While Australia has focused on building and repairing military vessels at domestic shipyards, the government recently said it would outsource two large warships to either Spain or South Korea because of lower costs. (See Asia Pacific, page 10.)
The Canadian government is attempting to revive the industry here with its $38.3 billion National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy (NSPS). In 2011, the government announced Seaspan would have the opportunity to bid on civilian vessels, while Halifax's Irving shipyard would bid on warships.
Thus far, Seaspan has won contracts to build 17 vessels, including ships for Canada's Coast Guard and oceanographic research vessels.
“The Canadian government isn't supporting Canadian shipbuilding for a private ship owner. They're only doing it to build their own vessels,” Webb said. “It's both a national security issue in the case of warships but also a core skill issue if there was a defence need.”
The painful lesson learned, he said, is how hard it is to ramp up the highly specialized skill set once it's been lost.
Two Canadian university programs now offer naval engineering training. Memorial University in Newfoundland graduates highly sought-after students from its ocean and naval architecture program.
Those graduates are “gone in the wink of an eye,” Webb said, often to work on oil rigs on the Gulf Coast.
“We're exporting a lot of these people,” he said.
In response to the NSPS, the University of British Columbia (UBC) restarted its naval architecture and marine engineering program, graduating its first cohort this year. But the university had already lost its towing tank – a research facility where students and faculty can test out ship designs – to a condo development shortly before the NSPS was announced.
Both Seaspan and Robert Allan Ltd. have co-op students from the UBC program working in their offices this summer.
As part of the NSPS agreement, Seaspan will contribute funding to UBC's naval engineering program.
Carter said Seaspan has finished its international recruitment and will now focus on hiring local engineers.
“We're at the point where we're ready to fill the ranks with high-potential people from the regional markets here who are a good fit for our culture and come from these solid engineering schools that are around us.”
