So where is the third one? and who is Terence Mckenna? And tell us again how many years it took to get those three secondhand tubs seaworthy. And how many millions.
There are four submarines in the RCN... Victoria, Chicoutimi,Corner Brook, Windsor. Here's how it works in our navy, in the US Navy, the Royal Navy, Chinese Navy ... every navy: Half of your ships are deployed/ready to deploy and half are being "worked up", maintenance, upgrade, re-fit, training. That's pretty good. Fifty years ago, one third were active, one third in re-fit and one third in training.
The Brits just built two carriers. That means that they can always deploy one. They used to have three Harrier carriers and they were able to deploy one. They MIGHT get able to deploy two in an extreme emergency but the second one is never properly ready and it may be a bad idea. The Americans can sail 1/3 to 1/2 of their carrier fleet at any given time. The same goes with all their vessels.
Canada has four submarines deployed evenly on both coasts. That means, we can sail one on each coast. The Australians have 7. They can sail 3 ... maybe. They have serious problems with theirs. The many problems with ours (mostly caused by us rearranging the torpedo systems), not by the Brits) were eventually solved.
We received the Brit subs with their Brit weapons systems that launch Brit-designed torpedos and cruise missiles. The RCN spec. called for the Mark 48 torpedo that we have been using for some time. We share the Mark 48 with the Americans, Australians and the Dutch. The Brit system would have been shared with the Brits ... only. There is considerable logic in choosing the American system as there are so many of them available all over and therefore the cost per round is lower and availability should never be an issue. Canadians have even developed our own proprietary control setup for our Mark 48s and we transferred them over from the previous "O" class submarines.The bad news is that to fit our torpedos in a Brit sub, we had to lengthen them. That is considerably difficult, slicing a piece on to a pressure vessel that is meant to operate at 500 plus depth. We made a lot of trouble for ourselves and that's what we get for not having custom vessels constructed to our needs.