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There’s no arguing the F-35 is hugely expensive. How expensive is a moving target, determined by the number of planes rolling off the assembly line in any given year. In some respects it is more plane than Canada needs, and less. More, because the F-35’s emphasis on stealth makes it a vanguard weapon, and Canada does not typically lead international bombing campaigns. Less, because it has only one engine and two are handy in the high Arctic, in the event one fails.

There are three problems with ditching the F-35 out of hand, however, which may be why Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan has not done so, thus far. First, you can’t rightly call it an open competition if one plane is out of the running from the get-go. Second, multiple Canadian aerospace subcontractors are working on F-35-related contracts, which would be imperiled in a cancelation. Third, and possibly most important, the F-35 is not just an aircraft, or even a so-called 5th Generation stealth aircraft. It’s a networked, mobile global data-gathering system. For the Canadian military to have access to the data, it must have access to the plane.

But none of this mitigates that the existing fleet of CF-18s is long past its best-before date. There were originally 138, purchased between 1984 and 1989. There are fewer than 80 still flying, many of these patched with parts cannibalized from those taken out of service. In the aftermath of its F-35 meltdown in late 2012, sparked by spiraling life-cycle and other costs and exacerbated by ministerial bungling, the Harper government opted to extend the old planes to 2025, at a cost of about $400-million. But many of the airframes are nearing the end of their safe working lives, which clock out at about 7,000 flying hours. As of 2010, before the Libya, Eastern European and Iraq missions, most of the planes had logged more than 5,000 hours.