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Critics, however, allege the government has manufactured a gap to justify buying a plane other than the F-35. They note the previous Conservative government committed $500 million in 2014 to extend the lives of the CF-18s until 2025.

A spokeswoman for Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan says the government has no plans to cancel those planned upgrades. In fact, Jordan Owens said 26 CF-18s — or about one-third of the fleet — have already undergone structural work to be able to operate to the mid-2020s, and electronic upgrades are planned next.

However, Owens said Canada has a certain number of CF-18s committed to defending North America through the joint Canada-U.S. aerospace command, NORAD, on a daily basis. It also has a certain number of fighter jets committed to NATO.

“And when you add these two numbers together, that is greater than the number of planes that we can put into the sky on an average day, which we would call mission ready,” she said. “So that is what we are defining as a capability gap.”

Owens wouldn’t say how many CF-18s are actually needed to meet Canada’s NORAD and NATO commitments for operational security reasons.

Asked the same question, Defence officials pointed to Royal Canadian Air Force commander Lt.-Gen. Michael Hood’s comments to a parliamentary committee in April.

“We started with 138 (CF-18s),” Hood told the Commons’ defence committee on April 14. “Currently, we feel that we do not need more than 65. The situation has changed. Our commitments have changed over time. So that was a conscious decision not to increase.”