In my opening remarks I spoke about Canada aspiring to leadership. We aspire to leadership of military operations as well. So that's one aspect of why submarines are very important.
If you want to produce senior military or naval leaders who have a broad understanding of how to do warfare across the whole range of domains of maritime warfare, then they need experience in those areas. It's important that we have submarines from that perspective.
It's also important to have submarines from the perspective of information sharing. The submarine community is, I hate to put it this way, but it is a bit like a club. Information is shared if you're a member of the club; it isn't shared if you aren't. I found in many of the previous iterations of my career, it was remarkable the amount of information we had on the movement, not only of our own submarines, but of all of our allies' submarines, and where they were going. We had shared intelligence on the threats against submarines by being part of the club. That's also an aspect.
The other aspect as well is that of sovereignty. There is no other platform that we have in Canada that is as strategic in nature as a submarine. Why I say that is because a submarine has the ability to do what's called “area denial”. You put a submarine into a patch of water and nobody wants to go there. I can give you some examples of how we've actually used submarines in that respect even by Canada's standards. But when you put a submarine somewhere, even an aircraft carrier won't go there unless they have sanitized the area before they put their high-valued asset in.
Other nation's submarines don't want to necessarily go there. Because you don't know where the submarine is, and you can deploy it anywhere in your own sovereign water space, you have the capacity to deny anybody entering into those areas just simply because they don't want to get caught if they are violating territorial waters, for example.
On all of those areas, I'd say it's critically important that Canada continue to operate submarines. I've been a big proponent. I'm a submariner. I commanded a submarine. I've spent a lot of my career in submarines. I'm a very big fan of that capability. I think it's critically important that we retain it.