*OTTAWA, Canada: Canada announced plans Monday to buy 88 US-made F-35stealth fighter jets to replace its aging fleet, and meet new threatsincluding from Russia.*
The F-35 “has proven to be a mature, capable and interoperable aircraft andthat is why we are moving to the finalization phase of this procurement,”Defense Minister Anita Anand told a joint news conference with ProcurementMinister Filomena Tassi.
“Canada has one of the greatest air spaces in the world and we have to makesure that our next fleet of fighter jets is flexible, agile and able tomeet a wide spectrum of threats,” she said.
Lockheed’s fifth-generation F-35 stealth jets are considered the mostmodern combat aircraft in the world, and their unique shape and coatingmake them harder to detect by enemy radar.
The new aircraft’s central role will be to patrol North American air spacewith the US Air Force under NORAD.
But it could also be tasked with helping to bolster NATO defenses inEurope, or other overseas missions.
Foreign Minister Melanie Joly told reporters in Ottawa that the F-35decision was “an important step in making sure that we increase ourcapacity on the military side.”
“Why? Because… the world changed on February 24th,” she said in referenceto the start of Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Top bidder Lockheed Martin beat out Saab’s Gripen, after Boeing’sSuperhornet was excluded from the running, and an Airbus-led consortium andFrance’s Dassault Aviation withdrew their Typhoon and Rafale fighters,respectively, from the competition.
Ottawa had earmarked Can$19 billion (US$15 billion) for the purchase sixyears ago, and Tassi said negotiations with Lockheed Martin would nowproceed to finalize the contract within the next seven months.
She said she expects “delivery of the aircraft as early as 2025.”
*Procurement politics*
Canada spent two decades helping to develop the stealth fighter with theUnited States and its allies.
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But when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals swept to power in 2015 hescrapped three previous administrations’ plans to purchase thestate-of-the-art F-35 to replace its aging F-18 fleet, calling it tooexpensive.
Prior to Monday, Canada was the only nation in the partnership not yetcommitted to buying the F-35s.
This investment in Canada’s air force, according to a government statement,will be the most significant in more than 30 years.
It follows Germany’s announcement mid-March to buy 35 F-35s as part of amulti-billion-euro push to modernize its armed forces in response toRussia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Finland’s order of 64 stealth fighters inDecember after seeing a spike in incursions into its airspace by Russianjets in recent years.
Airbus said when it withdrew from the Canadian competition in 2019 thatNORAD security requirements were too expensive, while sources told AFP thatDassault Aviation was unable to meet technical requirements tied toCanada’s membership in the Five Eyes intelligence sharing group of nations.
The Five Eyes group is comprised of Canada, the United States, Britain,Australia and New Zealand.
Ottawa had planned to buy 18 new Boeing Super Hornets as a stopgap while itrelaunched the procurement competition, but that deal fell apart over atrade dispute.
Boeing had filed a trade complaint against Canada’s Bombardier in an effortto keep Bombardier’s new CSeries jetliners out of the US market, resultingin 300 percent duties being slapped on the planes.
Bombardier eventually sold a majority stake in the new plane to Airbus.
And Canada bought 18 used Australian F-18 jets to fill an air force interimcapability gap. These were similar to its own F-18s, which were firstdeployed in 1983.
