It would all be irresistibly comic, if it were not so ruinous. More than 12 years have passed since the day in 2010 when the Conservative government announced it would buy 65 Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets, a replacement for the air force’s fleet of CF-18s that even then were universally described as “aging.”
The process by which the F-35 was chosen, a sole-source contract without competitive bids, was controversial, as was the price: $9-billion, plus – well, it was hard to get a straight answer out of the Tories when it came to the costs of maintenance and operations. At length an estimate emerged of the full “lifecycle” cost of the jets: $45-billion over 30 years. True, the plane was widely acknowledged to be state-of-the-art, the most advanced of its kind in the world. But critics wondered why Canada needed to have the very top of the line in fighter jets, especially at the price.
