In April 1966 the Royal Canadian Navy sent its only aircraft carrier into a shipyard at Lauzon, Quebec, for a mid-life refit. The point of a mid-life refit is the clue: you spend the money because the ship has another life to run.

She came out sixteen to eighteen months later, depending on whose account you read, having cost somewhere between eleven and seventeen million dollars against a budget of eight. Thirty-one months after that she was paid off. In 1971 she was cut up in Taiwan.

HMCS Bonaventure was the last aircraft carrier Canada owned, and the country has never replaced her. The men who flew from her have spent fifty years pointing out that she was scrapped at the exact moment the money had already been spent.

A hull that waited seven years

She began as HMS Powerful, a Majestic-class light fleet carrier laid down for the Royal Navy and launched in February 1945. Three months later the war ended and work stopped. The hull sat.

Construction resumed in 1952, this time for Canada, and what emerged in 1957 was not a 1945 ship. She had an angled flight deck, a steam catapult and a mirror landing sight — the three inventions that made jet operations from a carrier survivable, all of them barely a few years old. The crash barrier came out. She was commissioned at Belfast on 17 January 1957 and reached Halifax on 26 June.

At 16,000 tons and 214 metres she was small as carriers go. Her air group reflected it: sixteen McDonnell F2H-3 Banshee fighters, eight Grumman CS2F Tracker anti-submarine aircraft and a handful of Sikorsky HO4S helicopters. For a middle power in the North Atlantic in 1957, that was a serious instrument.

What she was for

Canada’s job in NATO was submarines. The Atlantic convoy routes that had kept Britain alive twice were the same routes that would have to carry reinforcements to Europe in a third war, and the Soviet submarine fleet was the thing that would try to cut them. Bonaventure was the mobile centre of Canada’s answer: a flight deck that could put anti-submarine aircraft anywhere in the ocean rather than waiting for the ocean to come within range of a shore base.

The Trackers were the point of her. Canada licence-built ninety-nine of them, and eight lived aboard. The Banshees were there to keep Soviet maritime patrol aircraft away from the fleet, and they stayed on standby until 1962.

The Tracker was not a glamorous aeroplane. It was a high-winged twin with a fat fuselage full of sonobuoys, a retractable radar under the belly and a crew of four, and it could stay airborne for nine hours looking for something that did not want to be found. It was also, by a distance, the most capable thing Canada could put over a submarine.

The Tracker’s whole career, from hunting submarines off Nova Scotia to fighting fires in British Columbia.

She went to Cyprus in March 1964 carrying Canadian peacekeepers. She was recalled from a NATO exercise during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 and sent to sea with the rest of the fleet under the cover story of national exercises, to avoid frightening anybody. In April 1962 a Tracker made her ten-thousandth arrested landing.

HMCS Bonaventure, Canada’s last aircraft carrier.

The refit

By the mid-1960s she needed work, and in April 1966 she went to Davie Shipbuilding at Lauzon on the St Lawrence. The estimate was eight million dollars.

What the yard found was a ship with problems dating back to her construction — not surprising in a hull that had been laid down in the war, abandoned for seven years and finished to a different specification. The work grew. The bill grew with it.

Here the record genuinely disagrees with itself, and it is worth being honest about. The Royal Canadian Navy’s own published ship history says the refit ran sixteen months and cost over eleven million dollars. Other accounts say eighteen months and seventeen million. The Canadian Encyclopedia splits the difference and says the refit cost between 12.5 and 17 million against a budget of eight. What nobody disputes is the direction: it took longer than planned and cost at least half as much again, possibly more than double.

It became a political story. And a political story about a warship is a dangerous thing for the warship, because the figure that sticks in a minister’s mind is the overrun, not the asset.

Paid off

The Trudeau government’s defence review of 1968 and 1969 looked at Canada’s maritime role and produced an answer built on surveillance and sovereignty. There was no carrier in it.

Her last night deck landing was on 28 October 1969. Her last deck landing of any kind was on 12 December 1969. She paid off at Halifax on 3 July 1970, fewer than three years after coming out of the yard, and was sold for scrap. In 1971 the Tung Chen S Steel Company broke her up in Taiwan.

The Canadian Encyclopedia’s assessment is blunt: she was sold as an economy measure despite having, in its words, another ten years of usefulness in her. And she was not replaced. Canadian fixed-wing naval aviation ended with her; everything Canada has flown over salt water since has taken off from a runway.

Colonel David Tate commanded VS 880, the Tracker squadron, from August 1969 until August 1971 — which is to say he was the last man to command a Canadian carrier squadron. Interviewed by the Canadian War Museum in 2001, thirty years on, he was still not reconciled to it. On hearing it was actually going to happen, he said simply that it was quite a blow.

The longer version of the story, including the refit and the decision to scrap her.

The anchor

At Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, where the harbour opens to the Atlantic, one of Bonaventure’s anchors stands on a granite plinth facing the sea. Plaques around it name the men who died serving in her.

It is a good memorial, and an awkward one. Canada spent seven years finishing a wartime hull, thirteen years operating it, and a fortune refitting it — then disposed of it three years later and built nothing to take its place. Fifty-five years on, the argument about whether that was thrift or vandalism has never quite been settled, which is why the anchor is still worth visiting.

Sources: Royal Canadian Navy ship histories (canada.ca), The Canadian Encyclopedia, Canadian War Museum Oral History Project (interview 31D-2-TATE, 18 October 2001), Legion Magazine, Canada Aviation and Space Museum.