fighter jet series by Michael Bussière
MAY THE BEST PLANE WIN SAAB Gripen E
ou’d think a country with a vast Y arctic frontier sitting on top of the 2nd-largest geographical footprint on
the planet would make defence and territorial surveillance, and therefore military procurement, a top policy priority. Not this country. The sad tale begins with the Ross rifle, the Canadian-made preference to the British Lee-Enfield rifle that would have equipped Canadian forces similarly to other troops from the Empire during WWI. Sir Sam Hughes, minister of Militia and Defence, was an ardent supporter of the Ross, but the Ross had the unfortunate tendency of jamming and failing in battle, resulting in hundreds of thousands being withdrawn from service in 1916 and replaced by the Lee-Enfield. Laurier’s government established the Royal Canadian Navy in 1909. It chugged along underfunded for decades until WWII when our fleet topped 471 fighting vessels that dominated the North Atlantic. 110 vessels and 10,000 men landed in Normandy in June 1944. Things skidded off the runway again with the legendary Avro Arrow, the often-cited example of world-
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leading Canadian innovation that failed to launch due to government apathy. Then there was the DEW (distant early warning) line, a string of 63 radar stations from Alaska to Greenland that left a toxic mess, requiring $575 million to clean up the chemicals. Or Canada’s on again/off again flirtation with nuclear weapons. Or Paul Hellyer’s integration and unification of Army, Navy and RCAF into a single green uniform. Or Mulroney’s disintegration with a wardrobe makeover of said forces in 1984, before he torpedoed DND’s nuclear submarine hopes. Is your head spinning yet? There’s more. In 1993, Jean Chrétien won a general election in part thanks to his promise to scrap the Mulroney/Campbell purchase of the EH-101 helicopter, the replacement for the Sikorsky CH124 Sea King, a twin-engined antisubmarine warfare helicopter designed for shipboard use by Canadian naval forces, based on the US Navy's SH-3. Chrétien called the EH-101 a "Cadillac" helicopter, especially relative to a federal deficit the size of Hudson Bay, making the purchase politically and fiscally untenable, even though the Sea Kings were 30 years old back
then.They served the Canadian Armed Forces from 1963 to 2018. Equipping military forces is extremely expensive. Healthcare tops the list of government budget lines here at home, compared to defence, homeland security, and veterans affairs in the US. We don’t wrap our identity in military might as do our benevolent neighbours, so frigates and jets are a hard sell when hospital wait times affect us all. We’re also a country that is letting the prime minister’s official residence degrade into an historical ruin. There’s also the naive question by some regarding who exactly we are defending ourselves against. Russia may seem a very far ways away on the far eastern frontier of Europe, but it is in fact sitting up there just over the horizon from Ellesmere Island where arctic ice is giving way to an abundance of resources. At an April policy convention, the NDP's Spadina-Fort York riding association put forward a resolution which stated “An NDP government will commit to phasing out the Canadian Armed Forces. All members … will be retrained … into civil service roles that help expand
