Canadian Politics Today

You can't compare post WW2 militaries with today, no one has a military anywhere near the size they did at the end of the war, including the US and Russia. Our navy may have been the third largest in number of ships but it was a small ship navy, primarily destroyers, frigates and corvettes. Our largest ships were a few escort carriers and a couple of cruisers.

Nothing wrong with mandatory service, all the Scandinavian countries have it as well as Switzerland. Sweden and Switzerland may be neutrals but they also know neutrals have to look after themselves because they don't have alliances to rely on.

My legal opinion to you would be the Charter of Rights the way it is written could most likely  be used to prevent mandatory service or even alternative non military mandatory service.

Today we need a navy but yes its a total change in ship technology. We actually could get the biggest bank for the buck with ice breakers,  state of the art patrol vessels like Germany sent to Israel, or modern version frigates. The smaller faster moving ships now can do the job of the former large destroyers. Also if we had Griphon fighter craft  which are short take off and landing and can land on ice and only need a 5 man support crew with a pick up truck  we could buy more fighters and still have money for the navy. We have no need for large ships.Our main mission at sea is to prevent people and drug smuggling, search and rescue, fishing violations and surveillance. Sea war is not a reality unless you are a Euro nation with Russia or dealing with China in the Pacific and Canada is too small to finance a large international naval fleet. What we can do is finance specialized commando units like we use in Ukraine or specialized training forces like we do in Iraq. Nothing wrong with that if its done properly.