yes you were steaming around doing sweet **** all.
Our raison d'etre (That's French Hoid. Look it up) at the time was to move a mechanized brigade across the Atlantic in time of crisis in Europe ... i.e. if the Warsaw Pact rolled across the River Elbe. I believe that we were supposed to move it to Norway, although you can be pretty damned sure that Norway would have fallen before we got there as would Paris, Bonn, and Belgium would have been a smoking radioactive wasteland full of unburied bodies ... again ...and our Mechanized Brigade would have had to land in Portsmouth as per usual and become part of the defences of the Island of Britain, as per usual.
So, Canada's NATO commitment was to do this as an autonomous unit. ... so not hitching a ride with the Yanks or bumming their naval assets, hence the small and unambitious Brigade-sized commitment we made. (Trudeau token)
Maritime Command concentrated their better assets into Halifax, such as they were. All of the DDH ...heliopter carrying destroyers were on the East Coast except for two of the shiny, new "280 Tribals" that went to the West Coast ... presumably to give them SOMETHING to work with. All of the St. Laurent and Annapolis Class DDHs went to the East Coast to provide some sort of air cover for the theoretical Canadian military convoy we were charged with contributing. The two newest AOR supply ships ("mother ships") were in Halifax, too Preserver and her sister Protecteur, leaving the old HMCS Provider as the only other ship capable of carrying helicopters back in Esquimalt. Two of the then powerful "New" Tribals and all three of the awesome "O" boat submarines rounded off the sea fleet. The Reserves were trained up with trades appropriate to man requisitioned civilians vessels ... I would say, roll on/roll off ferries, like the ones that BC Ferries operates would have made up a lot of a mech brigade convoy ... maybe a few Coast Guard Vessels, sans the big red stripe. Anyway, the Professional navy would have done the fighting and the Reserves done the transporting, as per in previous conflicts. I would imagine that Esqui!alt would have been gutted of it's crews to get everyone to sea.
Like it or not, that is what we were there to do.