Absolutely.
One of the great difficulties we face whenever we talk about submarines—and this gets right back to your colleague's comment on secrecy—is that we don't know their record of success.
In other words, if you talk to Rear-Admiral John Newton or anyone who has submarines under their operational command, they'll tell you that they can't talk about how successful they are. We will hear about every single failure, every time one goes bump in the night or there is some episode. We often do not focus on the fact that the other nations maintaining submarines have had far worse accidents than what we have had.
Having said all that, why we need submarines relates first of all to something which Dr. Charron was referring to, and that is domain awareness. The only way that our allies and friends will share information in terms of what their submarines are finding and doing is if we have submarines. If we don't have submarines, we don't have shared undersea water domain awareness.
Second, we need to have that independent capability so that the Chinese or any future threats don't just think, “Oh, we only have to think about the Americans. We don't have to think about the Canadians because they have no capability.” It factors into their calculations.
The third factor, and this is one which, as Canadians, we don't like talking about, is that into the future, given the nature of where torpedo capabilities are going, the only way that you are going to defend against a submarine with a torpedo that has a 100-mile torpedo range at speeds almost approximating those of surface missiles is by having your own submarine.
Having a surface vessel means you're just going to be a floating target at some point for submarines, given where technology is going. If you want to defend against submarines, you need to have submarines yourself.