The Seemingly Endless Saga Of Canada Buying New Fighter Jets

Those moderately familiar with the seemingly endless saga of replacing our aging fleet of F-18 fighters cannot be faulted for thinking "just get on with the job!".  It has been back and forth for what seems like decades.  (It has been - the F-35 development program started in the 1990s and the debates over whether Canada should buy them have been raging since 2010 or so.  

That was then, this is now.  In 2010, the US was a reliable partner for trade and defence.  Then January 2025 happened, and all that changed. The geopolitical context shifted as the US entered Trump's second term as president.  Alliances that had been tried and true since WWII were called into question, the US started throwing up trade barriers everywhere, and so on.  

Suddenly, Canada's earlier decision to replace the F-18s with F-35s fell into question, and in fact our whole approach to defence did.  An ally we had long looked at as "a good neighbour" suddenly was making noises about annexing Canada.

The parameters of the decision around the F-35 changed enormously.  Concerns about everything from parts supply and maintenance to rumours of Washington having a "kill switch" available that rightly spooked a lot of people.  The newly elected government in Canada, led by Mark Carney committed to reviewing the F-35 decision.  

In response, Sweden's Saab group sweetened its offer around the Gripen - promising partnership and helping Canada set up a military aviation manufacturing capacity, where the F-35 deal ultimately restricts Canada's ability to service its own aircraft, with regular servicing having to be done by Lockheed Martin, and there is no visibility for Canada into the software systems that manage the aircraft.  Suddenly, even if the F-35 is the technologically superior aircraft, it is no longer clear that it would be suitable for Canada, especially if Canada finds itself in a standoff with its neighbour.  

Amid the backdrop of negotiations with the US for a renewed CUSMA, ongoing threats from the Trump administration, and the Canadian government reaching out around the world to forge new trade agreements outside of the multilateral agreements like CUSMA, Canadians are getting increasingly concerned about decisions that would tie us more closely to the US.

Like the Auto Strategy that the government released a few weeks ago, the new Military Strategy released this week marks a sharp turn away from the existing structures that depend so much on the US.  It's an ambitious plan, one that will shift Canada's economic and military posture significantly (and one that will no doubt make certain corners of the Trump Administration angry).  

Unjust Laws and Restricting Rights Unnecessarily

Alberta has already begun restricting transgender rights, and in the wake of the shooting in Tumbler Ridge this week,  I fully expect that the UCP government will move to further restrict transgender rights in Alberta - there's already plenty of noise on various conservative discussion forums demanding "action", and if there's one thing that Danielle Smith is good at, it is doing her party's bidding when it is at its most loathsome.  

I have spent considerable time analyzing those laws, and at best they are ill-thought out reactionary responses to imagined problems rather than actual issues.  However, in a country where politicians can legitimately override rights by invoking the Notwithstanding clause, what can we the public do to undo the damage done by a reactionary government?  

Correlation Fallacy and the Tumbler Ridge Tragedy

Yesterday, a person in Tumbler Ridge, BC went into the high school and shot a large number of people, killing 6 at the school, and injuring dozens more.  This is after they had shot and killed two family members in their home. 

Today, we learned that the shooter was a young transgender woman who had dropped out of high school a few years ago.  Predictably, our friends over at The Western Standard jumped on this to argue that somehow transgender identity is therefore intrinsically dangerous. (I won't link to material I consider overt hate literature - a series of screen copies will be provided at the end of this which will contain the offending column).  

The writer, Christopher Oldcorn, has been carrying the "anti-transgender banner" for Western Standard since at least 2022, possibly earlier.  His working thesis here seems to be "well, because the shooter was transgender, clearly gender affirming care doesn't work", or something to that effect. 

Poilievre Gets an 87% Approval Vote

 CPC leader Pierre Poilievre won his leadership review vote with over 87%. What does this tell us? 

I'm sure that within Liberal party ranks, there is a certain amount of cheering going on, since Poilievre is polling well behind Mark Carney for "preferred PM".  Almost certainly if an election were held today, the Conservatives would lose (again).   While in the short term, Poilievre's victory might appear to be a boon for the Liberals, I wouldn't be quite so quick to cheer.

Having replaced Jenny Byrne with Steven Outhouse, I think we can expect to see yet another round of "rebranding" applied to Poilievre's image.  His speech last night gave some hints of that beginning.  There was a definite effort not to be quite as obnoxious as he has been in the last year or two (although I doubt very much that he's going to be able to pivot away from a reflexive tendency to attack after 20 years of practice).  Branding, or image, whatever you want to call it, does matter in politics today, and conservatives have a disturbing ability to make otherwise unpalatable candidates look "good enough" to voters who don't pay close attention. 

The real issue with the CPC isn't "the leader", and it really never has been - it's what the party represents and has become over the years from its beginnings as the prairie rump "Reform Party" through to its current form.  Reform was always a party of extremes - weirdly authoritarian and libertarian at the same time, and substantially driven by a bunch of Social Conservative (they aren't really conservative) grievance groups.  

As the party expanded eastward, it ran into a number of roadblocks where they just couldn't seem to make headway - especially in Ontario and Quebec.  That led to a shift and some rebranding efforts that tried to paper over the perception that the party was dominated by Christian Fundamentalists from the Prairies.  Fast forward through the merger with the old Progressive Conservative Party to today, and we need to spend some quality time reading through the party policy book and the policy motions.  

Unfortunately, in these documents lies a ton of policies that the party doesn't talk about - policies which ultimately are designed to implement many aspects of the socially conservative (regressive) state that Prairie Evangelicals have been pushing towards for decades.  Journalist Marci McDonald documented it really well in her book "The Armageddon Factor".  Although the book is now somewhat dated, it does document much of the drive for the religious right to gain control over the Conservative Party.  

Now, in part, we need to understand that when people are accusing the CPC of having a "hidden agenda", it's not that the agenda is "really hidden" - it's well known and documented.  However, when politicians sit there and say "oh, I won't do _THAT_", they're engaging in deceit.  Poilievre has done this repeatedly on the abortion topic, only his party keeps these topics alive in their policy declaration.  

In more recent history, in Alberta we've seen this deceit used by the UCP under Danielle Smith.  So much of what she said she "wouldn't do" while she was running in 2023 mysteriously became legislation starting in 2024.  At this point in time, I wouldn't trust any party that refuses to talk about any topic that's in their policy manual.  

This is fundamentally the core of where Poilievre has a problem - he is at the helm of a party that I characterize as half a dozen angry badgers in a trench coat.  No amount of rebranding is going to address the fundamental issue that the CPC has major players in it that have "views" that are radically divergent from those of most Canadians. 

I take last night's confidence vote in Poilievre as a sign that the CPC has turned inward.  They aren't receptive to the opinions of the broader public, rather they have decided that they are going to attempt to deceive Canadian voters into electing them so they can impose an agenda that is regressive at best.

So, Trump Wants To Decertify Canadian-Built Aircraft

 So, the latest Trumpian temper tantrum is that the US will decertify Bombardier built aircraft.  On the surface, this is as ridiculous as it seems.  Ostensibly, this temper tantrum is over Canada having not (yet) certified several newer models from Bombardier rival Gulfstream.  But is it really?

Consider the following:  only 4 days ago, US Ambassador to Canada Hoekstra was making threats over the purchase of F-35s, and an orchestrated defence of the F-35 started last fall.  The Americans started sweating over the F-35 sale to Canada quite a while ago, and Sweden/Saab's offer presents Canada with the ability to reboot its aerospace industry in a way that we haven't seen since the cancellation of the Avro Arrow project.  

Now, here's where Trump's outburst may in fact finalize Canada's pivot away from the F-35 - let me explain:  

That Is Not A Sales Pitch

According to US Ambassador Hoekstra, if Canada doesn't buy the full fleet of F-35s, "that will affect NORAD".   Coming from the Trump regime, this is another mafia-esque threat that boils down to "do as we tell you, or else".  

Hoekstra might think that yammering on about NORAD, interoperability, and how the F-35 is "the superior aircraft" is some kind of sales flex.  It's actually telling us all that buying the F-35 is ultimately going to be a huge mistake for Canada. 

Every second day, the US is threatening to annex Canada, and as our European friends just learned in the dust-up over Greenland - a deal with Trump made today isn't worth the paper it's written on tomorrow. Why would Canada think we'd be treated any differently if we bought the F-35? 

If I was a defence planner for Canada (I'm not), I'd be looking at the current situation and saying to myself "why would Canada buy a major military asset from a country that is threatening to invade us?".  

The F-35 is very much a "closed, proprietary platform".  What assurances do we have that any planes sent to Canada don't have a "kill switch" buried in their software that Washington can use at will? Fundamentally, there are no such guarantees, and that has been a concern about the F-35 in my mind for a very long time.  

Then there is the servicing of the F-35 itself.  Need parts for the F-35?  Buy it from Lockheed-Martin (now a division of Boeing) ... need major service?  Well that plane now has to be shipped to facilities in the US.  Software updates?  Oh yeah - that's a thing, and those will also have to be installed in US facilities.  Starting to see a problem here, when the US has decided that we're the adversary?  

Hoekstra wants to talk about the F-35 as the "superior aircraft".  Maybe the F-35 is on some levels a "better" aircraft technologically than its rivals - but when the country selling it can so easily turn a fleet of F-35s into "Tarmac Princesses" by choking off parts supply, or by leaving booby traps in the software that enables these craft to fly, technical superiority takes a back seat to "actually flies".

If I were making the buying decisions for Canada's military, I'd be looking at the ground game as it looks today, not how it looked prior to 2016.  The ground game today is very different.  The US has shown itself to be not merely an adversarial nation, but it is one where an agreement today means nothing tomorrow.  This is a purchase that will affect Canada's military for the next 3 decades or more.  Even if the F-35 is technologically "the superior aircraft", that means very little if it effectively hands the US control over the fleet either directly or indirectly.  

Implications For Alberta Separatists From Trump's Invasion of Venezuela

 Yesterday, the US attacked Venezuela and captured its president and his wife.  This move has significant implications not only for Venezuela and its people, but it also stands to have significant consequences for Alberta and its oil industry.

To put it mildly, this has major implications for Alberta separatists, and in particular those who are in a great big hurry to make Alberta "the 51st State".  Let's talk about that.