In 2017, HMCS Chicoutimi undertook a dangerous and difficult assignment. For months, the Canadian submarine operated as part of an international task force enforcing sanctions against North Korea. The mission demanded long stretches of silently listening and watching as ships moved along the coast. From this vantage point, Chicoutimi gathered intelligence on vessels suspected of carrying contraband and cued surface warships to intercept them.

The risks were real. North Korea’s navy had fired at, and even sunk, South Korean naval patrols in these waters. For the Royal Canadian Navy, however, the mission was a vindication. Canada’s current submarine force—four boats in total, all bought second-hand from the United Kingdom—has had a troubled history, and none embodied this more than Chicoutimi. In 2004, a fire during her delivery voyage killed one sailor and left the vessel sidelined for years. Operating off the Korean Peninsula, Chicoutimi showed that she, and her Victoria-class counterparts, could still shoulder an operationally significant role.

But their replacements are now in sight. We are in the final stages of selecting up to twelve new submarines, the first of which are expected to take to sea next decade. A German Norwegian consortium and a South Korean company are both competing for the contract. Cost estimates depend on which submarine we buy and how we equip it, but figures in the range of $100 billion are being reported. This sum includes the initial purchase price, plus the cost of operating and equipping the submarines for the decades-long life of the project.

The new submarines are designed to launch long-range precision attacks against targets inland, an entirely new capability for Canada’s fleet, previously equipped only with torpedoes. At present, only the United States, UK, and France operate submarine-fired land-attack cruise missiles among Western navies. This fact speaks to a reality yet to sink in for many Canadians. The subs are only the beginning. We are preparing to pour unprecedented sums into our armed forces. Before Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government stated this year that Canada would finally meet the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s longstanding target of allocating 2 percent of the gross domestic product to defence, we were spending $30.9 billion a year on defence. Carney’s commitment to the new NATO target of 5 percent of GDP for defence and defence-related infrastructure by 2035 will require annual expenditures of up to $150 billion.

The result will be a country forced to confront the reality of projecting power. Submarines embody this. Stealthy and lethal, a modern submarine can clandestinely watch and threaten a potential enemy. Simply knowing that Canada has such weaponry forces an adversary nation to assume that they could be present anytime, anywhere.

In March of this year, the commander of the RCN, Vice Admiral Angus Topshee, made some comments to an Ottawa audience which neatly sum up where the submarine purchase will take us as a country. Given how rarely senior military leaders are so open about these issues, his words are worth quoting at length. The new vessels, he said, represent:

a very unCanadian capability, and that’s the ability to stealthily approach another coast and hold them at risk. Because in this world, it’s not enough to sit back and wait for someone to attack us and hope that we can defeat that attack. We need to be capable of deterring that attack and, potentially, retaliating against that attack to make sure that we can protect ourselves and hold them at risk, just as they hold us at risk. It’s a different world. It’s a different way of thinking for us in Canada.

Are we ready for what this means?

Canada’s experience with submarines dates back to 1914, when two were hastily purchased at the outbreak of the First World War. They saw limited wartime service, were sold for scrap in 1920, and were not replaced for many decades. Starting in 1965, three British-built diesel-electric submarines entered RCN service, marking the arrival of Canada’s first modern submarine force. Known as the Oberon class (O-class) and named after Indigenous nations—Ojibwa, Onondaga, and Okanagan—their acquisition had been anything but smooth: initiated, abandoned, revived, and ordered as Conservative and Liberal governments turned over (some things never change).

They had initially been purchased as training targets for the surface fleet, giving destroyers and frigates something to practise against. During the Cold War, however, they were upgraded into combat-capable attack vessels—quietly, and without much public discussion. This enabled them to be operated in the North Atlantic as part of the larger NATO force, which monitored, gathered intelligence on, and, if necessary, was prepared to strike Soviet submarines and warships in the event of conflict. Although we had only three of them, some twenty-seven O-class submarines were built and operated by several navies around the world. This meant that costs were held down as engineering, training, and maintenance could be shared over a much larger fleet. The last one was decommissioned in 2000, well past what should have been the end of its life.

With the end of the Cold War, the RCN was deeply concerned that the O-boats would not be replaced. Years of defence cutbacks and government austerity made acquiring a new submarine fleet exceedingly difficult. This was a serious problem. Skills required to operate and maintain submarines are what the service calls “perishable.” If they are not used continuously, they atrophy; maintenance facilities fall into disuse, while highly trained people go off to do other things, and their experience is lost as there is no pipeline of people being trained to replace them. The navy knew that restarting a submarine capability from scratch down the line would be horrendously expensive and time consuming if that capability was allowed to die with the decommissioning of the O-boats.

There was another reason why Canada’s naval leaders wanted to maintain a submarine force. Given their inherent stealth, submarine operations require that friendly nations take steps to prevent collisions and what the military calls “blue-on-blue” engagements: instances wherein friendly forces mistake an allied vessel for a potential enemy. Thus, the concept of “Waterspace Management” emerged.

What this amounts to is that allied nations share the locations of their submarines whenever there’s a chance they might come into contact. NATO goes so far as to establish patrol areas to ensure only one allied sub is in a given space. This means that, when a NATO submarine detects another vessel in its patrol area, it can safely assume the intruder is an adversary. For Canada, maintaining subs off our coasts ensures that allies must inform us if their vessels enter or pass near our waters. In the late 1990s, when replacing the aging O-class fleet became urgent, Waterspace Management did not extend to the high Arctic—our subs couldn’t remain submerged long enough to operate safely beneath the ice, so other nations had no obligation to report their presence there. Still, keeping a submarine fleet allowed us to monitor what even our closest allies, including the Americans, were doing along our other coasts.

In the 1990s, Canada faced limited options for replacing its aging O-class subs. Many Western nations had moved to nuclear fleets, and costly new conventionally powered models were out of reach. This left Britain’s Upholder-class vessels as the only practical choice. Renamed the Victoria class when they entered Canadian service, these subs were a dicey proposition. They had been decommissioned almost as soon as Britain built them—as a cost-saving step after the UK moved to an entirely nuclear-powered fleet—and sat at dock for years before Canada finally bought them in 1998.

The result was predictable. Breakdowns and ballooning costs dogged the program. The navy knew this was likely to happen. An internal Department of National Defence study in 2003, while the acquisition was still in progress, found that the costs and difficulties of bringing these “off-the-shelf” boats into Canadian service had been significantly underestimated by the navy in its public statements. Unlike the O-boats, the Victorias were effectively orphans—only four were ever built and Canada took them all, assuming the full maintenance of these already tired boats and all aspects of training their crews.

For Canada’s navy, however, the imperative was to keep submarines in active service, lest the capability to operate any submarines at all was lost. Thus, the Victorias were always going to be a bridge to a next option. Naval officers believed that Canada would eventually come to its senses and realize that it needed a larger fleet of submarines able to patrol all three of its coasts, as well as to contribute to international operations. That day is here.

If we do end up buying twelve of the new submarines, particularly if we field extremely capable and advanced vessels with land attack capability, it will make us a serious undersea player. By comparison, Germany is planning to buy only nine of the submarines that its own consortium is pitching to us. Whichever option we select, our submarines will no longer be orphans; they will be part of a larger international fleet, which can be maintained and upgraded more cost efficiently than a small class of boats which only we operate; engineering work, training, and costs can be spread over a larger number of hulls.

They will transform where we can go and what we can do. Technological advances mean that the submarines will finally allow Canada to operate beneath the Arctic ice. The key is “Air Independent Propulsion,” which enables non-nuclear submarines to remain submerged for extended periods—long enough to make under-ice patrols feasible. Climate change has also changed the environment: the ice is thinner, the passages more open, and the region’s strategic and economic importance greater than ever as transit routes open up and strategic minerals become accessible.

Having Canadian submarines routinely patrolling the Arctic would, at last, give us a presence in waters where others have long moved unseen—and oblige our allies, at least in theory, to tell us when they’re there. (Right now, we are helpless if a country decides to sneak up to the Arctic coast of North America and fire a land attack missile. If we cannot prevent that, the US will do it for us, and they will enter our waters without telling us if they have to.)

And with that kind of reach come new possibilities—and new “unCanadian” responsibilities. In normal peacetime, a fleet of twelve will allow Canada to always have at least one sub off each of its coasts, with some available to perform international tasks. In a crisis, we will be able to “surge” several of them into a conflict zone for a period of time—if we choose to do so—in order to alter the balance in a given region.

These are not small numbers. And if we have a surface fleet of commensurate size and capability, which defence planners also anticipate as budgets go up, Canadians are going to have to get used to the fact that we are going to have a navy capable of playing a leading role in the fighting that may be done by future coalitions. We presently have a fleet of about twenty principal warships, many of which are old and in need of replacement. With defence spending at 5 percent of the GDP, one can imagine a more modern fleet twice that size.

What has also arrived, to refer back to Vice Admiral Topshee’s comments, is a willingness to admit, from the outset, that these submarines are to be employed as lethal weapons. Also of note is his admission that we will not simply be using them to defend Canadian waters. Though that is their primary purpose, we also intend them to be used to threaten others who we believe are threatening us. While this is something we have always done quietly with our O- and Victoria-class boats, we are now going to make no bones about it, and the land attack missiles these submarines will carry will vastly increase the threat they pose to adversaries.

This points to a host of bigger issues. It’s true that Canadians are more alert to the vulnerabilities in our north. In a 2024 Nanos poll, most said they supported acquiring submarines to defend the country. But it’s not clear that Canadians are used to thinking of themselves as a serious military power. It will require some significant leadership on the part of our politicians and military leaders to take the public consciousness into this space.

And, of course, it’s not only about submarines and the larger navy. This will also be true of the army and the air force. We presently have roughly 86,500 people in our military, counting both regulars and reservists; this could easily more than double. Permanent bases abroad, such as the ones we maintained during the Cold War, are completely feasible if we wish to signal our determination to defend allies (and newly important trading partners as we try to rebalance our trade away from the US) in Europe and Asia. A fleet of advanced fighters in the hundreds is likely, rather than the few dozen old aircraft we presently have. We are about to go on a spending spree not seen since World War II.

Are we ready for this? Do we understand that we’re on the verge of being able to respond to threats ourselves, instead of depending on the US to do it for us? Do we understand that with this capability comes an expectation from allies and adversaries alike that we will be prepared to use it? Is our political and diplomatic class ready to think of Canada as something other than a small, lightly armed junior ally—one that’s long been free to say what it wants without any real expectation of having to act?

Though we have not been leading peacekeepers for a very long time, many Canadians still consider Canada primarily in that light—when they think about defence-related matters at all. But peacekeeping no longer means, and has not meant for a long time, a few lightly armed troops sitting on an internationally agreed line between combatants who accept their presence. It means fighting your way into messy civil wars in faraway places and enforcing ceasefires and peace agreements in the face of serious opposition. We will soon have the capability to play a leading role in such missions. Will we act on it?

Canadians are also used to their governments making significant international noise around high-profile, values-based ideas, which play well with domestic constituencies on both sides. Whether it is the Liberal “Responsibility to Protect” or the Conservative rejection of “coddling” dictators at places like the United Nations, especially if they are perceived to be anti-Israeli, we have made a specialty of what might be called “foreign policy by noisy initiative.”

These episodes have played well with key domestic constituencies, but they have also been largely cost free. It is all very well to call on the international community to intervene in countries where human rights are being abused, or to oppose authoritarians—such as when we referred Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro regime to the International Criminal Court in 2018 for crimes against humanity and rallied allies for democratic restoration. How willing will we be to lead the charge when we will be expected to commit serious military forces to it? In short, we are about to learn that you have to be ready to put your soldiers’ lives where your mouth is.

It must also be asked whether the Canadian military is ready. It is deeply ingrained in their thinking about equipment, doctrine, and operations that their proper place is as an adjunct to the US military. Can they adapt to a world in which the US is no longer the benign leader of the Western military family but is, under President Donald Trump, going in directions we no longer wish to follow? This is not hypothetical. For many years, Canada has contributed substantially to US-led drug interdiction operations in the Caribbean. Today, with the US summarily blowing up alleged drug-running boats, possibly in contravention of international law, questions are being asked about how much longer Canada can co-operate in such missions. Though Canadian officials argue that there is a firewall between what they are doing and the troublesome US actions, how much longer can that be maintained; how long before, say, information gathered by a Canadian surveillance aircraft is used as part of the intelligence upon which illegal targeting decisions are made by the US military?

There will always be co-operation with the US on issues like North American aerospace defence. But other international objectives—those the US refuses to join or even opposes, such as major peacemaking efforts in Africa—or missions that increasingly see it violating international or Canadian law, may require us to think for ourselves and build coalitions with other like-minded nations, where we play a much larger role. This shift will not come naturally, or easily, to Canada’s military. It will take real leadership and imagination to embrace the opportunities that defence independence demands. That must begin now, even if changes are still years away.

We need to start preparing to think like a country that can act on its own. Until now, as a small member of larger coalitions, Canada could defer the hard calls about using force to others. That will no longer be true. If we’re going to deploy significant lethal force—for example, to enforce a peace agreement the US won’t join—we must be able to explain clearly why we’re doing it and own the decision. A more robust foreign service, focused more on hard security and defence-related issues than at present, will be required to inform that decision making. And if we really want to understand our allies and adversaries for ourselves, we may have to cross a Rubicon we’ve long avoided and build a foreign intelligence service.

In short, the submarines are a harbinger of things to come. If this defence increase goes ahead, Canadians will, on a host of levels, need to become much more hard-nosed—more “unCanadian”—about the world and our place in it.

Peter Jones is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.