By Andrew Erskine, February 20, 2025
If Canada hopes to overcome the tyranny of distance and secure sovereignty over its Arctic territories, it will need the capability to quickly respond to safety and security threats. The maritime challenges alone are daunting, including extreme weather conditions and shifting sea ice. Then there is the crippling lack of critical land and air infrastructure: roads, bridges, and tunnels, as well as airfields, runways, and logistical support for air capabilities.
It’s a complicated situation to say the least. Canada’s means to deliver and sustain emergency and military presence deep into the Arctic are limited. At the same time, the Artic is increasingly becoming an epicentre for diplomatic influence, economic prosperity, and national security.
To address this challenge, Canada signed a trilateral partnership in 2024 with Finland and the United States to increase collaboration on designing, producing, and maintaining polar icebreakers. By sharing information and harmonizing the shipbuilding industries of all parties, the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort (the ICE Pact) aims to lay the foundation for a resilient and competitive initiative to develop world-class polar icebreakers.
However, little progress has been made so far in determining how the ICE Pact will collectively invest in scaling production and linking ship design knowledge to reduce the cost and delivery times of icebreakers.
Moreover, US President Donald Trump’s transactional diplomacy and “Buy America” position pose serious challenges for Canada, since Trump wants American service ships being solely manufactured in American shipyards – as underlined in the US Jones Act.
To ensure that the partnership produces the best available platforms for all ICE Pact members, as well as future NATO allies, the focus should be to deliver a one-hull and modular ship design for polar icebreakers.
Why Icebreakers?
Incorporating new forms of technology – unmanned drones, surveillance balloons and artificial intelligence – into the maritime domain of Western Arctic nations will be vital. However, Canada still needs the resources and capacity to perform the human dimension of Arctic missions – especially as the Arctic Ocean becomes more accessible for seafaring military and security operations and commercial and civilian purposes.
Indeed, the Arctic is at a reflection point that could see higher frequencies of ship collisions, environmental disasters and criminal activities that will require specific, responses. There is currently a growing strategic competition to capitalize on the Arctic’s natural resources and critical mineral mapping and extraction. Several countries, including Russia and China, are seeking new trade routes through the region – both for legitimate means, to get goods quicker to and from west-to-east markets, and illegitimate means, to conduct illicit activities and avoid international sanctions.
Due to these factors, icebreakers, with their powerful engines, reinforced hulls, and thick steel structures, remain the dominant platform to oversee law enforcement, humanitarian, environmental and emergency response, and search and rescue operations. Moreover, by having the necessary means to withstand and break through thick ice, the ships also accommodate aircraft, qualified personnel – military, coast guard, law enforcement or scientific researchers – and other utilities like towing notches, winches, and cranes for multipurpose tasks. The ships also possess the capacity to store fuel, supplies and equipment required for unaided and self-supported missions, an essential capability given the Arctic’s remoteness and lack of critical infrastructure.
The ICE Pact offers the opportunity to integrate Finland’s industrial shipbuilding know-how – ranging from designing and constructing a cost-conscious and fast-delivered vessel of high industrial ice-class – with Canada’s high degree of competence in operating multipurpose tasks, and the US’s capacity for researching and developing advanced and sensitive technologies for communications, command and control, surveillance and sensor capabilities.
What can be done?
For the ICE Pact to be functional, the partnership should immediately consider incorporating a one-hull design for all future icebreakers. As it stands, there are many hull types that address operational needs for different types of ice (pack ice, brash ice, and cake ice) and ages of ice (new ice, first-year ice, and multi-year ice). These important distinctions have led to icebreakers with specific ice-classes that define ice-strengthening requirements and polar-classes that highlight the durability of vessels operating in Arctic conditions.
The hull types also correspond with the size of the vessel in operation. Presently, icebreakers are constructed as small, medium, and heavy vessels. These variations permit icebreakers to operate within inland waterways like lakes and rivers, littoral operations along coastlines, or in larger open bodies of water like the ocean.
However, it can be challenging to operate multiple hull variations due to budgetary constraints over innovation, maintenance of aging vessels, and sustaining standards of high-readiness and compatibility. Moreover, with varying hull sizes and types, each icebreaker must have tailor-specific propulsion systems that result in expensive procurement programs, increased training and maintenance standards, and material-support costs.
Since the ICE Pact nations expect to operate their icebreakers exclusively in the Arctic – specifically the Arctic Ocean and the northern coastal areas along Canada, America, and NATO maritime territories – they should have a baseline hull design for medium and heavy icebreakers.
Medium-sized icebreakers (MSI) have traditionally operated in non-Arctic waterways in the winter and in the Arctic during the summer season. Primarily used for multipurpose tasks – search and rescue (SAR), emergency response operations, and seasonal ice-breaking – in coastal and inland waterways, MSI are cost-effective and versatile vessels for moderate Arctic conditions.
However, for MSI to operate in severe Arctic conditions without losing the ability to accomplish their core missions, the ICE Pact should have a baseline hull design in place that would allow MSI to operate in moderate-to-difficult ice conditions year-round – thereby having an ice-class between 1A and 1B and a polar class of PC 3.
This updated hull design would ensure that MSIs remain serviceable in tighter spaces and shallower areas near coastal areas while having the capacity to support some missions designated for heavier icebreakers independently or jointly without fear of the numeral “go, no-go” decision criteria that have plagued MSI in the past.
When it comes to heavy icebreakers (vessels capable of breaking ice that’s between 1.4 to 2 metres thick), the ICE Pact must plan a process that can balance the vessel’s core function with its overall hull design density as a way to offset unnecessary procurement costs that tend to balloon early on in the construction process.
Following the recent plans for Canada’s Polar Icebreaker Project and the US Polar Security Cutter project, the ICE Pact should remain determined to build a double-hulled heavy icebreaker that can operate in extremely difficult ice conditions in all polar waters year-round – resulting in an ice-class of 1A Super and polar-class of PC 1 or 2.
Under this vision, the ICE Pact will be capable of constructing heavy icebreakers for longer voyages deep in the Arctic by having a one-hull design that fulfills the need for having the dimensions to store fuels and supplies with space for vital machinery, assets for surveillance and command components all while preserving the ship’s greater stability and sea keeping capacity.
The icebreakers will need a baseline propulsion system, with Finland’s innovative engine design that uses both liquefied natural gas and ultra-low-sulphur diesel being an attractive prospect. A baseline hull design for MSI and heavy icebreakers can assist the ICE Pact in constructing, maintaining and modernizing the vessels more efficiently by having one engineering standard, and one set of parts, manuals, and technicians.
Modular ship fits the bill
A central problem with any ship-building strategy is that technology and missions change, often rapidly and suddenly, as new capabilities emerge. As a result, shipbuilders are in a consistent struggle over the need to deliver a functioning and operating platform that can also rapidly and inexpensively adopt or modernize.
Fortunately, modularity allows icebreakers to be equipped with mission-specific modules featuring the latest technology. Creating a modular standardization strategy to generate better modular adaptability will decrease the time icebreakers spend at shipyards by having modules undergo scheduled or urgent upgrades as per operational needs.
A modular design can also provide significant financial liberties for Ottawa, Washington, and Helsinki as modular parts serve as auxiliary pieces to the hull, which is the vessel’s main body. Due to this innovative design, vessels can be built with mission flexibility in mind, leading to better alignment with research and development, investment decision-making, and operational requirements. Lastly, the reusability of modules also leads to better shipbuilding efficiency as practitioners can reconfigure or rearrange existing specifications to meet the ever-changing needs of governments.
A modular design can also offer the ICE Pact a more simplified and integrated design and operationality of an icebreaker fleet. In particular, by possessing the capacity to slot in the corresponding module before and after a mission – whether it be emergency or SAR operations, scientific research support, environmental hazard response, civilian medical evacuation and supply missions or possible military operations in a time of conflict – a modular design can enhance the capability and versatility of icebreakers to handle any situation. For future purchasers, this will be an attractive proposition as any hull developed in Canada, Finland, or the US will seamlessly pair with modules shared among the partnership.
New realities need innovative solutions
Traditionally, nations requiring icebreaking capabilities have preached for a particular style of icebreaker that reflects their unique geography’s ice conditions and operational attitude. For Finland, this has led to a preferred style that can provide seasonal icebreaking capabilities in the Baltic Sea for maritime safety operations like assisting merchant vessels to safe navigation missions. Meanwhile, Canada has strived to acquire a multipurpose vessel – particularly the Harry DeWolf-class Arctic and Offshore Patrol Vessels – for seasonal Arctic surveillance and reconnaissance operations. The United States Coast Guard, on the other hand, has sought a similar multipurpose vessel, although with more security and military applications, for enforcing international treaties and American maritime laws, coastal and national security activities, and logistical support for maritime safety operations.
However, with Russia and China expanding their presence and capabilities into the Arctic, most prominently seen by Moscow’s dominance in the icebreaker domain – having the largest fleet in the world, including four nuclear-powered vessels – and Beijing’s interest in becoming a “near-Arctic power” – having already launched five modern icebreaker vessels – there is no time to squabble over traditional details that can favour one partner over the other for domestic priorities.
To deal with new geopolitical realities emerging in the Arctic, innovative solutions are needed to decrease the overall cost and delivery time of icebreakers – especially in Canada and the US where the shipbuilding industries are understaffed, inadequately resourced, and strained with preordered backlogs – and plug gaps in the maritime domain of Western Arctic nations.
While there will be resistance from traditional shipbuilders and politicians, having a plan for a uniform design of a one-hull and modular icebreaker ship will consolidate the ICE Pact as the best enterprise capable of delivering and sustaining vessels desperately needed for emergency and military presences in the Arctic.
Andrew Erskine a Macdonald-Laurier Institute contributor, a 2025 Emerging Leader with Arctic Frontiers, and a 2025 Young Leader with the Pacific Forum.