I'm happy to, and I appreciate the props for my Mad Men-style rhetoric.
There are a couple of variables at play, as noted in that paper. One, off-the-shelf can refer to buying directly from someone, an existing production line, or buying an existing design and then adapting it to your needs.
The risk there is that companies and countries that manufacture goods primarily do so with their own specifications, so a German submarine is primarily built for the realities of operating in the Baltic. It tends to be smaller, for shallower waters and not for such long distances, for example. Taking that design, even though it's “off the shelf”, would require modifications on the Canadian end to meet Canadian needs. Why would you buy a submarine that is limited in capability for your own navy, especially for a country with the world's longest coastline and three different oceans?
The second thing is that design changes are inherently complex and involve more than just an intellectual property negotiation and the costs that go with that. The design for an existing piece of equipment in production is a design that's probably several years old. Look, for example, at the Berlin auxiliary oil replenishment ship, which is at the heart of the new joint support ships being built in Seaspan, out of Vancouver. That design traces back to the nineties. When we bought it, it was roughly about a decade old, and we had to modify it for our needs. Then we had to modify the design, because it's a modular build, to work within the confines of the Seaspan yard, because the yard that built that ship was a much bigger yard, in Hamburg, Germany.
All these layers of complexity go into saying simply that we should always think about off-the-shelf, but as for the idea that it will be “quick” or somehow cheaper, I would definitely advise caution on that. These are much more complex, especially if you're talking about building domestically in Canada.