Canada's escort navy in the Battle of the Atlantic

What made the Royal Canadian Navy important in the first half of the twentieth century?

Its strength was a huge escort force whose anti-submarine work was essential to the Battle of the Atlantic.

Canada did not field a battleship and possessed little larger than light cruisers or escort carriers. Its wartime weight came from building and manning a very large number of smaller hulls. Flower-class corvettes, Hunt-type escorts, Tribal-class destroyers, sloops, trawlers, and other vessels formed a broad anti-submarine and convoy force. That fleet helped sustain the North Atlantic routes on which Britain and the wider Allied war depended. The example shows how aggregate escort capacity can make a smaller navy strategically indispensable without a single capital ship.