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Back in November, when the Liberal government announced it would be making an “interim” purchase of 18 Super Hornet fighter jets from Boeing, it was all about the need for speed.

There wasn’t time to hold an “open competition” to select a permanent replacement for the air force’s aging fleet of CF-18s, as the Liberals had promised during the election. The reason: the government had discovered a critical “capability gap” in our air defences that had to be filled at once.

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tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Andrew Coyne: ‘Urgent’ Super Hornets just another pawn in Trudeau’s desire to prop up Bombardier Back to video

Well, here we are in May, and the Super Hornets that were supposedly so urgently necessary to the defence of our national borders turn out to be just another in the apparently endless list of pawns to be sacrificed in pursuit of the Trudeau government’s real and only strategic objective, propping up Montreal-based Bombardier Inc.

Billions of dollars in direct and indirect aid to Bombardier, from both the federal and Quebec governments, having met with the entirely predictable response from its competitors — not only a suit before the World Trade Organization on behalf of Brazil’s Embraer, but latterly a complaint to the U.S. Commerce department by Boeing, demanding retaliatory duties of nearly 160 per cent — the government has now taken the unprecedented step of tying an important procurement decision to the outcome of a private trade dispute.