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The Australians … have acquired new ones. It's not impossible

Canada had a plan to replace the jets by now, or at least to have the effort well underway. In 2010, the Harper Tories announced that Canada would purchase 65 F-35 stealth fighters. The announcement was instantly controversial due to the high cost and the sole-source nature of the acquisition, and ultimately went nowhere. It was an election issue in 2011, but despite winning a majority, the Tories didn’t proceed with the purchase and twiddled their thumbs for their entire mandate. It was an election issue again in 2015, with the Liberals promising to not purchase the F-35 and to hold an open and fair competition to select the CF-18 replacement. It seemed not to occur to them that these two promises were in conflict.

Photo by Canadian Forces Combat Camera, DND

It didn’t seem to bother voters much — the Liberals won a majority. They also then spent the next 3.5 years accomplishing the square root of zero, presumably because they couldn’t quite figure out how to hold a fair and open competition where one of the primary candidates was already excluded. Almost the entire Liberal mandate has essentially been them ragging the puck, no doubt in the hopes that Canadians will forget about the promises they made back in 2015. In that light, the billion-plus dollars the Parliamentary Budget Officer says we’re spending on the used Aussie jets is essentially a nine-figure punt into the next mandate.

Nine years. Two elections. Two parties in power with majorities. An identified need for new fighter jets. And absolutely nothing to show for it beyond a plan to solicit bids, none of which are likely to be chosen before the fall election. Not that there’s a guarantee that the party in power then won’t just reboot the entire process again, or defer it to some later mandate, if political or economic forces make that a more palatable option. We’re really good at that part — the deferring and the rebooting. It’s the actually buying desperately needed military hardware part where Canada comes up short.