The grocery list, for me, is that we need two joint support ships in whatever guise is reasonable. We need two HADR ships, as long as they have significant refuelling capacity to spell the JSS, the joint support ship, when it's in refit. It becomes a far more useful vessel if it has that kind of refuelling capability.
Admittedly, the national shipbuilding procurement strategy must live within its means, but we must look, probably in two years, when the final bill comes through for the Canadian surface combatant project, to make sure that we get something in the range of 15 ships, i.e., replacing basically what we have from an era where, I would argue, the threat was less than it is today.
Next, we currently have four submarines. One's in refit, one is in training, and one is available on each coast, maybe. This is so close to the bare bones that it would take only one small hiccup and a coast is left without a submarine. The bare minimum is six. You just have to ask how Australia figures they need 12.
Then, if you buy an HADR ship—and people always forget that it might cost $2.5 billion for each ship—what you also need is another billion dollars' worth of troop-carrying or load-carrying helos, at minimum, probably, of 10 per ship, and you need about half a million dollars' worth of hovercrafts for them. On the shopping list, then, is that each comes with a crew of 500, and an annual O and M bill of about $500 million for the two of them, i.e., operations and maintenance, gas, spare parts, and the like.
Finally, in my perfect world we would be deploying submarines to the Pacific from time to time. In fact, that would be a great way to be reassuring some allies if we can't get ships there, if we don't have a sufficient number of ships. In that case, perhaps, one of these HADRs also serving as a submarine tender would make sense.