Your questions are excellent. The submarines do matter to the thinking of both the Chinese and the Russians. For the Chinese, if we actually had been thinking, when we should have, of some form of submarine capability for the Arctic.... The newly announced third icebreaker the Chinese now have, which has a deep-diving submersible that puts our cables at risk, along with the independent SOSUS the Chinese have developed, all point to the fact they see the north as undefended.
To get to a really critical point at the heart of your first question, which is that we talk about political will, look at our enemies over the long term. In 1989 China had a defence budget of $19 billion, which was $3 billion less than Canada's. Following Tiananmen Square, it had the political will to become a military superpower, and it now has the largest navy. Look at the GDP of Russia from the period of 1989 to 2024. It is roughly equivalent to the GDP of Canada. There are different ways of counting it, but it's within that ballpark figure. Russia is now the number one military threat to Canada. It made the political decision to become an aggressor state, to oppose NATO expansion and now to threaten us.
Now, I'm not saying that Canada would ever be in a position to match them dollar for dollar for their defensive capability, but we can see clearly that when we have an aggressor state such as Russia making the political decisions it is making and the Canadian state making political decisions not to do anything, I think that really illustrates Justin's point that this is an issue of political will, not capability.