Tribal class fleet destroyers hull construction required a high-tensile (HT) specialty steel that was neither made in Canada nor available for purchase from the United States.

Steel which Great Britain, overtaxed by the growing demands of a general European war, could not provide and that Canadian mills proved slow to produce.

The hulls of low performance corvettes and frigates, designed to merchant ship standards and powered by triple expansion steam engines, could be built from the mild steel readily available from Canadian sources.

However, high performance warships, like destroyers, require hulls built as light as practical to obtain the maximum speed possible from the available power plant whilst still carrying a useful armament.

Further, at the time Micmac's engines were ordered, the primary contractor, John Inglis and Company, was itself in considerable administrative difficulty arising from the increased demands of wartime procurement.

The serious impact of this situation may be grasped when one considers that Micmac's hull was completed in Halifax after 32 months but the ship had to wait another full year for the delivery of her machinery from Inglis in Toronto before her fitting out could commence.

[3] The selection of Halifax Shipyard for the construction of the first Canadian-made Tribal destroyer was made by Canada's Minister of Defence for Naval Services, Angus L.

[5] MacDonald was both a Nova Scotia native and a former Premier of that province, an office he would re-occupy after the war's end until his death in 1954, a political connection that did not go unnoticed.

Further, from 1940 until the end of the war the limited, albeit increasing, technical facilities and skilled labour force available to Halifax Shipyard were necessarily concentrated upon repair and refit of ships damaged in innumerable Atlantic convoys departing from Bedford Basin.

While the Halifax Shipyard had built four large freighters at the end of the First World War as well as an advanced icebreaker, Micmac's yard number, hull No.

Nelles' evident design was to employ the funding opportunities afforded by the conflict in Europe to establish the post-war RCN as a major, and therefore permanent, part of Canada's defence strategy.

Obtaining the necessary infrastructure to support a 'big ship' fleet and the technical know-how to do so in the vicinity of the Navy's home port of Halifax was crucial to that endeavour.

Early in the morning of 16 July 1947, Micmac embarked a number of civilian contractors and proceeded to sea from Halifax to conduct full-power trials off Sambro Head.

Shortly after the trials completed, just before 13:00 hrs, HMCS Micmac was in collision with the Victory ship SS Yarmouth County (ex-Fort Astoria).

During this conversion her broken keel was finally made good and the forward armament was returned to a conventional arrangement of four 4"/45 HA guns in two twin mounts.

As she was completed too late to see service in WWII and was unavailable for deployment at the time of the Korean War, Micmac has the distinction of being the only one of the 27 members of her class never to fire a shot in anger.

Originally designed to counter enlarged French, German, and Italian inter-war destroyer classes—therefore intended primarily for service in the relatively sheltered waters of the Mediterranean and North Seas—the remarkably heavy armament and very high speed of the Tribal class were purchased at the cost of extremely light hull construction.

The transverse strength design[16] of the class, coupled with light hull plating, therefore lacked sufficient longitudinal stability and proved far too flexible and weak in North Atlantic service.

As the years passed all of Canada's Tribals, both British and Canadian built, developed more frequent and more extensive structural defects necessitating increasingly long yard time for repairs and restrictions placed on their employment.

[citation needed] Eventually, the growing cost of their maintenance and their demands on the Navy's restricted manpower no longer could be justified by their decreased capabilities.

All of the RCN Tribal-class ship's names have at various times been assigned to training divisions of officer cadets at the former Royal Roads Military College.