Roundup: Buying the F-35s after all

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We are now somewhere around day thirty-four of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and there are claims that Ukrainian-forces have retaken a Kyiv suburb as well as another city further east. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is preparing for another round of peace talks with the Russians and sounds like he is willing to declare the country neutral and give up any hope of future NATO membership in exchange for peace and future security guarantees (NATO membership wouldn’t come so long as there are territorial disputes, meaning so long as Russia occupies Crimea and the Donbas regions, it would be impossible). Zelenskyy also briefed Justin Trudeau on the talks yesterday, because they are keeping each other in the loop.

https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1508520970516058121

Closer to home, the announcement was made that the government will finally be settling on purchasing F-35 fighter jets to replace our aging CF-18 fleet, leading to questions about whether the last seven years were wasted when the previous Conservative sole-sourced contract was cancelled in favour of a new competition. And if you read the 2015 election platform promise about cancelling the purchase, it was because it was sole-sourced for a high price, given that the goal of a competition is to get a better price, so we’ll see if that pans out. It’s still not a done deal—they now get to negotiate directly with Lockheed Martin to get the best deal possible—but we have to remember something of what happened with the previous announcement, particularly that it was done poorly, and the Auditor General called out how opaque it was, and that’s kind of a big deal.

We should also remember that the planes are a much more mature platform now, with many of their flaws having been worked out (though I haven’t heard yet whether the ejection seats will still kill you if you’re below a certain height and weight, because that was a real problem). It does sound increasingly like the biggest consideration was the interoperability with NATO and NORAD fighters, meaning we had to be fairly seamless with the Americans, rather than just the promise of regional job creation programmes (though Canada being a participant in the joint strike fighter programme the whole time means we’ve already had some of those industrial benefits throughout). We’ll have to see what more the government can extract from Lockheed Martin in promises as those negotiations carry on throughout the year to see whether that seven-year delay was worth the wait.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau and Steven Guilbeault will be unveiling the country’s Emissions Reduction Plan today, as part of the pathway to net zero by 2050.
  • Trudeau also noted yesterday that high energy prices because of the sanctions on Russia are pushing the world to developing greener energy sources.
  • The Star has the behind-the-scenes look at what it took to secure the child care agreement with Ontario.
  • Sean Fraser says the government plans to offer language training and employment assistance to Ukrainian refugees when they start arriving.
  • Quebec is now in a sixth wave of the pandemic, fuelled by the BA.2 subvariant of omicron, but let’s keep insisting on lifting all restrictions.
  • CSIS says that Canada is subjected to thousands of cyber-attacks every day, and that the figure is only increasing.
  • Elections Canada admits that three remote First Nations communities in Ontario were largely disenfranchised because of cancelled polls that weren’t communicated.
  • Métis and Inuit delegates met with the Pope yesterday, while First Nations leaders won’t be until Thursday.
  • Pierre Poilievre is backing crypto currency because he likes to watch YouTube videos about it, and I cannot even. He’s literally endorsing pyramid schemes.
  • Kevin Carmichael walks through the Bank of Canada speech last Friday, and why it signals steeper rate hikes as the move to aggressively tackle inflation.

Odds and ends:

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One thought on “Roundup: Buying the F-35s after all”

  1. Poilievre has reached the highest level of the minimum competency standard as the prime example of how the autocratic leadership of the conservative party has mandated for those who show the most loyalty to aspire to a position of power. No meritocracy there but we all knew that. Meanwhile I can’t wait for the plethora of supposed learned media commenters such as Rex Murphy to snow the uneducated in society of the brilliance of the metallic motormouth who would if elected put Canada into a most perilous financial position by espousing cryptocurrency. Pierre the ultimate “stupid” will say that he is totally familiar with all aspects of the cryptocurrency universe and we should all follow him unquestionably. Sort of like asking people to suspend their belief systems the way the ancients did when the catholic church convinced them that by buying absolutions from unwashed priests would entitle them to an entrance to heaven. Delusion for the masses….works every time!

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