Buying expensive fighters from unfriendly neighbours

It is long past time for Canada to put an end to the interminable saga of the F-35 purchase.

Especially considering the correct decision only becomes more obvious with time.

Set in motion during the reign of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government nearly 16 years ago, the purchase of dozens of advanced F-35 Lightning II fighters from the United States has been an albatross around the neck of subsequent governments, none of which has yet been able to settle for good on whether to buy the jets in order to replace Canada’s aging fleet.

The deal seemed to be sewn up in January 2023, when the federal government announced it had finalized an agreement with the U.S. government, defence company Lockheed Martin and its partner Pratt & Whitney to purchase 88 of the jets. Yet three years later, Canada finds itself reconsidering again.

There were always reasons to be skeptical of the purchase. The F-35, for all its touted advancement, seems to be an accident-prone machine — about a dozen have crashed since 2018, including last July when one went down in central California (its pilot safely ejected).

Now, there are clear political and national security-related reasons to shop elsewhere.

Interim NDP Leader Don Davies rightly pointed out on Wednesday that Prime Minister Mark Carney should hold true to his words at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and work with other “middle powers” at a time when longtime superpower allies such as the U.S. become less reliable (or even friendly).

That “less reliable” part becomes even more important once one understands how exactly the F-35 jets would work as part of Canada’s military.

In the first year of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second go-round in the White House, concerns in Canada and elsewhere have arisen that U.S. control of the jets themselves puts the countries flying them at risk. According to an Ottawa Citizen report in March, the Pentagon denies having a “kill switch” enabling them to remotely ground the fighters if they so desire. However, it did admit that the U.S. can control “the software and hardware upgrades needed for continued operations of the plane.”

In other words, if the U.S. so desired, it could effectively “brick” the fleets of other nations which have procured F-35s by simply refusing those fleets access to necessary updates.

Considering Trump is willing to withhold support from allies on a whim, this reality should be enough by itself to nix any notion of buying the jets.

“This is not just a fictional fear,” Davies said Wednesday. “Donald Trump did this to Ukraine. He threatened to withhold, and did withhold, parts to the F-16 fighter jet radar and left the Ukrainian Air Force in a lurch.”

Canada has an obvious alternate choice — the Gripen fighter built by Swedish firm Saab. Sweden, a stable fellow NATO member, is the clear better choice if Canada must invest vast sums of taxpayer money updating its fleet of fighters.

Ordinary Canadians have done their part this past year. They have passed over American-made products while shopping, and eschewed travel to the U.S., in response to a belligerent American empire’s constant threats of tariffs and its daydreams of annexation. It would be the height of hypocrisy for their government, after all the talk of “elbows up,” to turn around and spend a total estimated cost of nearly $74 billion on an F-35 program.

Taking our business elsewhere is also the only way we can be sure that, should new Canadian jets ever need to take to the skies, they actually work.