The classic example of this, and it's one that doesn't play well, is that Canada currently has four submarines that are semi-operable. Someone said, “We had a good year; we had 250 sea days.” That's four ships, meaning that on average one ship was able to operate for some portion of the year.
Submarines have a lot of great capability. I'm a big fan of submarines from when I was a kid reading about the U.S. submarine warfare in the Pacific. But it's an expensive capability, and Canada is unlikely to buy six, eight, or 10 new submarines in the near future, which is what it would need to actually do the job. Canada's submarines are entirely symbolic in the current format of having four submarines, two or more of which are semi-broken. To have a real submarine capability means to have a real submarine capability, and if Canada is unwilling to have a real one, I'm not sure why we should invest in having a fake one.
The problem is that if you stop having submarines entirely, then that means you're not going to have submarine capability for 20, 30, 40, 50 years out, and you lose the capability of the sailors and officers who are trained in this stuff. But the question I would then ask is this. Are we going to buy six or eight real modern subs in the near future? If the answer is no, then that's some place where we could have fewer officers and fewer sailors, and cut the size of the navy.