What Would It Take for Canada to Build Its Own Fighter Jets Again?

What happens when you lob a grenade into one of the costliest and most momentous defence deals in decades? This is precisely what Mark Carney, as newly minted prime minister, did when he directed then defence minister Bill Blair to review Canada’s purchase of American F-35 fighter jets and explore rival options. The debate over replacing Canada’s aging fleet of CF-18 Hornets has dragged on for decades. Fighter aircraft are a mainstay of modern militaries, used for air defence, combat, reconnaissance, and ground support. One hundred and thirty eight CF-18s first entered service in 1982. Their obsolescence is both an embarrassment and a liability. A recent military assessment noted that 60 percent of the Royal Canadian Air Force’s inventory is unserviceable. Canada’s search for new jets began in 1997, when the government invested in an American program to help develop a next-generation fighter. Thirteen years later, in 2010, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper pledged to buy sixty-five F-35 jets, to be built by United States aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. The incoming Liberal government of Justin Trudeau vowed to back out of the deal in 2015, seized by doubts about the military necessity of the plane and fearing the enormous cost of the purchase. Some estimates, factoring in full lifecycle costs, put the total as high as $25 billion. The Liberals promised a new round of consultations. This process included evaluating alternatives such as Sweden’s Saab Gripen E. That dragged on but seemed resolved when the government announced in January 2023 that it was going to acquire F-35 jets after all—eighty-eight of them, in new-found zeal. In truth, the government had few options. There was pressure to maintain defence partnerships with US contractors—which ensured Canadian firms a share of the profits—and many North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies had already committed to the jet, so refusing it would have made Canada an outlier. You can window-shop all you want, but sometimes you end up buying the thing everyone else already has. The decision was described as “an admission of defeat.” The resolve is now dissolving. NATO partner Portugal has launched a review of its own F-35 purchase, and in Canada, tensions with the Donald Trump administration and a dramatically altered geopolitical order are triggering similar doubts about the deal and whether it still fits our defence priorities. The Gripen E, once a long shot, is suddenly back in play. To be clear, as of this writing, the F-35 contract has not been cancelled, and the first tranche of sixteen aircraft is expected to be delivered next year. But at the heart of the debate is an uncomfortable truth: buying these jets ties Canada’s sovereignty to the whims of future US governments, which control upgrades and critical software systems. One way to make this predicament feel real, and to remind Canadians why it matters, is to revisit our past. A trip to the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa, located on the former Rockcliffe air base, offers a front-row view of the choices we’ve made before and the compromises they entailed. Canada has flown jets since the earliest days of the jet age. But the exhibits raise pointed questions about where our defence strategy is headed and who we’re willing to depend on to get there.

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Opened in 1960, and the size of a hangar, the museum showcases over 130 aircraft and artifacts—from biplanes and bush pilots to the original Canadarm. Navigate your way to the rear, past the dogfight heroes of the world wars, and you’ll find a crowded display chronicling every generation of Canada’s fighter jets. The very first, the de Havilland Vampire, with its twin-boom tail, joined the RCAF in 1946 and is so tiny it can fit on top of a module. It’s the plane made famous by Frederick Forsyth’s Christmas fable “The Shepherd” and the annual Alan Maitland reading on the CBC. Follow the path around the exhibit and you come to the North American air defence fighter CF-100; its replacement, the supersonic Voodoo; the cheapskate CF-5, a US hand-me-down to Allied air forces; the CF-104 Starfighter, a real rocket ship (watch Sam Shepard take it up for a monumental ride in the film adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff ); right on up to the current fighter jet, the CF-18, which sits wing tip to wing tip with the Starfighter and dwarfs it. The CF-18 is truly a museum piece, though still in service forty-three years after its initial arrival. Almost all in this parade are US-designed fighter jets. Only the earliest, the Vampire, was a British plane. The only Canadian-designed aircraft was the CF-100, rushed into service in 1952, with some 690 planes produced by A. V. Roe—or Avro—Canada during the 1950s. Avro launched a second ambitious bid to build a world-class fighter jet: the Arrow, a supersonic interceptor designed to counter Soviet bombers. When the project was abandoned by the government in 1959 over cost and utility concerns, that spelled the end of Avro itself. Once Canada’s third largest company and a storied innovator—with designs for a flying saucer and a hovercraft truck (shades of Elon Musk!)—it was abruptly dismantled. Some 14,000 employees were laid off and its few completed planes scrapped. What remains of the Arrow are a nose cone and a wing tip, housed at the very back of the museum, and a lingering set of “what ifs.” What if a domestic military aircraft industry had been maintained? What if made-in-Canada innovation had continued to find a home? What if an entire generation of highly skilled aircraft workers had not been flushed down the drain? Over the years, while designed in the US, at least some of Canada’s fighter jets have been built under licence in Canada. The list includes the F-86 Sabre, the CF-5, and the CF-104 Starfighter—all built by Canadair. Based in Montreal, Canadair was a subsidiary of the US manufacturer General Dynamics and was eventually sold to Bombardier. The CF-104 was Canadair’s last military aircraft. Bombardier does not produce fighter jets. Our current fighter, the CF-18, was originally designed as a US navy plane (the wing tips fold up for non-existent Canadian aircraft carriers). None are built in Canada. The cumulative story told by the museum is bleak. It’s a tale of the long-term hollowing out of Canadian military jet aircraft production and the attendant loss of innovation. But what if we could roll back this history? What if we could go back to Canadian-built planes like the CF-100 or the abandoned Avro Arrow? What if we ceased to rely on US fighter designs? What if we diversified our defence purchasing practices, looking to European-built planes as we once did with the long-ago Vampire? What was unimaginable two years ago—that Canada would or could do anything but ally with the US defence industry and buy its latest plane—is now much more real. To make sense of this change of fortune, we need to ask some basic questions about what fighter jets are and what their purpose is. Fighter jets possess common characteristics: they are technologically sophisticated, designed for air warfare, expensive, fast. Each has these qualities to varying degrees and in accordance with its era. The greatest variable may rest in its purpose. The Vampire and Sabre jets were meant as air-to-air combat planes, at a time when the experience of World War II was still fresh. The CF-100 was a North American air defence workhorse, designed to bring down Soviet bombers. The CF-104, a technological marvel, was designed to fly faster and higher than anything the Soviets could produce. We turned it into a low-level spy plane and tactical nuclear bomber (the nukes were American). The current jet, the CF-18, is a fighter-bomber last deployed in combat briefly in the coalition fight to destroy the ISIS caliphate in Iraq. And the suddenly controversial F-35? Its purpose: air dominance and penetration of enemy air defences. Lingering doubts about its match with Canadian defence needs are not, for the moment, driving reconsideration of its purchase. The reconsideration is political and economic. Political in the sense of whether the Canadian military should go on trusting the US as a monopoly supplier, economic in terms of bang for the buck and industrial benefits for Canada. But if the rethink over the F-35 proceeds in earnest under the new government, then the needle will have to turn to the question of the purpose of a new fleet. It’s a hard question for all Canadians but an important one that goes beyond pocketbook issues and brings us face to face with new Canadian defence needs in a dramatically altered world. The future use of fighter jets is essentially unknowable. The only thing certain about the future of war is that it has a future. As Richard Overy, a leading British historian of warfare, concludes, “There are scant grounds for thinking that a warless world is about to emerge from the current or future international order.” The past, as exemplified in the aviation museum exhibits, provides multiple answers about the war-like purpose of a combat air force. What we can be sure of is that a fighter jet is an enduring symbol of national identity, an expression of national interest, a punctuation mark about the meaning of security, and a commitment to a certain kind of world order. If that package is what Canada is buying—a symbol, a doctrine, and a commitment—how does the F-35 stack up against its re-emerged competitor, the Gripen E? The Saab marketing brochure for the Gripen certainly gets the symbolic nature of the contest, prominently displaying a picture of the plane painted with a gigantic Canadian flag. An F-35 fighter jet (Pexels) Let’s do a basic comparison of the F-35 and the Gripen E. Both jets have single engines to push the planes at unimaginable speeds—and cockpits that immerse pilots in data. Multiple advanced weapons systems can be hung from them. But much distinguishes the two planes. The F-35 represents technological sophistication and an American determination to lead the world in advanced manufacturing. It is a bigger, more powerful, much more complex plane. It has stealth (radar invisibility) and data integration capabilities that the Gripen lacks. It has greater war-fighting prowess, including penetration capabilities in enemy air space. Based on the scale of US production, it has marketing power and global export reach that the Gripen cannot match. The F-35 has been purchased by a wide array of air forces, ranging from the UK and many NATO partners to Singapore and neutral Switzerland. Only a handful of countries, led by Brazil, fly the Gripen. The Gripen E is a plane manufactured in a Nordic country, born to operate in northern climes, meant as a deterrent to Russia, able to function alongside NATO air forces. It has also been offered to Ukraine. It lacks the stealth capabilities that are the hallmark of the F-35. It’s not built to conquer the world technologically; it’s not designed to beat any air defence system. It’s designed to be good, even great, in an air deterrence mode. It’s fast (at a top speed of Mach 2, or 2,130 kilometres per hour)—faster, in fact, than the F-35 (top speed of Mach 1.6, or 1,960 kilometres per hour); light; highly manoeuvrable, and, like the F-35, it can carry plenty of weapons. Crucially, it is easier to operate and maintain; it can land on less well-prepared runways (including highways, at a pinch—don’t try that with an F-35); and it has an added fuel tank, an important consideration for any Canadian Arctic defence role. The Gripen’s biggest drawback is the limited scale of production and lack of major export markets, which is a constraint on in-service upgrades and lifespan. It doesn’t carry the “prestige” of the top-line US fighter jet, though that prestige may increasingly be tarnished by Trump. The F-35 is a plane designed to take on and beat the world. The Gripen E is a European plane, designed for European missions, including in the Arctic, for air defence and deterrence. The question, then, is which better serves as a Canadian symbol—an expression of national interest, security, and commitment to an international order: US world beater or Arctic defender? Given the sharp “America First” turn taken by the Trump administration, sticking the maple leaf on an F-35 is going to require a hard swallow. Not so for the Gripen E. Both planes could satisfy Canadian defence policy needs, but the Gripen E has the edge in Arctic and far-north operations. As for the signal that each plane sends about the international order: the F-35 matches American determination to contest and overpower any rival, with allies possessing similar planes lining up behind, while the Gripen E is all about defending the peace of the transatlantic security theatre and the Arctic. Where does Canada’s commitment lie? The US is disconnecting itself as a champion of the global order, and Canada is disconnecting from the US in turn. Reconnecting with Europe and a new vision of transatlantic security shifted northward seems in order. Acquiring the Gripen E makes sense in the present geopolitical era. What would really seal the deal is a Saab promise that the planes could be manufactured in Canada (as they are in Brazil). Which brings us, in the wake of the Carney grenade, to a simple course of action: buy as many Gripens as we can afford, drop as much of the F-35 contract as possible, build as much as possible in Canada. Do it quickly before the CF-18s start to fall out of the sky. Paint maple leaves on them all. The post What Would It Take for Canada to Build Its Own Fighter Jets Again? first appeared on The Walrus.