Why does Canada still need a navy?

It was well received largely because it discussed much of the rationale for maintaining a modern navy in Canada and helped further public understanding of the place of the Navy in the national fabric. [...] They have the right to sail the seas and the endurance to do so for the requisite periods, while land forces cannot present a credible level of coercion without overstepping the boundaries of national sovereignty.4 Although this uniqueness could be seen as a “continuation of policy by other means” it has more to do with the inherent operational flexibility of naval forces and the fact that interna [...] Because they are legal extensions of their parent state, warships have symbolic value; in this, the presence of a warship is a clear signal of the interest or concern of a state (or of a group of states in the case of a multinational force) over a situation. [...] The Historical Context of Canadian Naval Policy8 At the risk of being chastised by historians for over-simplification, one can divide the history of Canadian naval policy into three periods, the first two of which show consistency in the policy process and a third period, the present one, which shows a disconcerting lack of policy consistency. [...] An important difference between the two post-war periods was that in 1945-46 the Navy avoided disarmament on the scale of the scale of the early 1920s and was able to retain a small but effective fleet that could be used to form surface task forces (carriers, cruisers, and destroyers) for use under the new concept of multilateralism.