Saab is pitching itself to build the Gripen fighter jet, shown at an airshow in Colombia in July, and the GlobalEye surveillance plane in Canada.JAIME SALDARRIAGA/Getty Images
Saab AB has delivered new proposals to Ottawa that forecast the creation of 12,600 jobs if the Swedish company’s two main military aircraft, the Gripen fighter jet and the GlobalEye surveillance plane, are built in Canada.
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly confirmed that the industrial-benefits packages arrived in recent days and that the Saab pitch included building Gripens for Ukraine, which has said it wants to buy the planes, and possibly other export markets.
“We’re talking 150 to 200 aircraft being built in Canada,” she told The Globe and Mail on Tuesday. “Saab is offering a very attractive proposal to the Canadian government that has strong industrial development and job-creation aspects to it.”
Saab previously said that building the Gripen E model – the newest version of the single-engine jet equipped with the most advanced electronic-warfare systems – in Canada would create 10,000 direct and indirect jobs.
Ms. Joly said that the latest proposal set the Gripen job count at 9,000, while building the entire GlobalEye – which is based on the Bombardier 6500-series business jet – in Canada would create 3,600 jobs.
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Since Ms. Joly, the former foreign minister, became industry minister in May, she has been trying to find ways to offset job losses in the tariff-battered auto, steel, aluminum and lumber industries, which collectively have some 200,000 workers. Ramping up Canada’s defence and pharmaceuticals industries are options she and other cabinet ministers are pursing, as are her counterparts at the provincial level.
Ms. Joly said she did not know when Prime Minister Mark Carney would approve or reject the Saab proposal to build one or both of the planes in Canada. “There is more work to be done,” she said.
Canada has ordered 88 F-35 stealth fighter jets made by Lockheed Martin of Bethesda, Md., but has committed to buy only 16 of them. Shortly after he become prime minister in March, Mr. Carney ordered a review of the F-35 purchase.
Speaking to reporters in Rome in May, he said that 75 per cent of Canadian spending on weapons goes to U.S. products. “It will make sense to diversify on defence partnerships, particularly as we spend considerably more on defence … It‘s prudent to diversify your partnerships when there are questions of sovereignty at issue.”
The F-35 review has not been released yet and no date for its publication is known. “We are taking the Saab proposal very seriously,” Ms. Joly said. “We need to have greater autonomy from the U.S. on defence.”
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Several former Canadian military officials, among them Tom Lawson, who was chief of defence staff from 2012 to 2015, reportedly sent a private letter in November to Mr. Carney urging him to proceed with the full F-35 order, partly to avoid the complication and expense of running two types of aircraft – the F-35 and the Gripen – and partly because they thought the F-35 was the more capable plane.
Ms. Joly met with Saab officials at the Paris Air Show in June and, more recently, at the company’s head office in Sweden. Vic Fedeli, Ontario’s minister of economic development, met with Saab executives in Sweden in October to pitch building the Gripen in Ontario.
In November, Saab CEO Micael Johansson visited Canada along with an entourage that included Sweden’s King Carl XVI and Queen Silvia. Mr. Johansson visited Bombardier to promote the idea of the Montreal company building the Gripen and the GlobalEye. “If Canada wants to create sovereign capabilities, not only buying planes, we are prepared to do the tech transfer for Canada,” Mr. Johansson told The Globe just head of his Canadian trip.
Ms. Joly has been supporting the Saab campaign to build the Gripen and GlobalEye in Canada as the tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump cost Canada manufacturing jobs. The federal and provincial governments are offering incentives to some manufacturers to preserve their payrolls.
For instance, the federal government is offering low-interest loans, job-training packages and freight-price reductions to steel makers to preserve jobs and help them boost domestic sales as they lose them in the U.S. “They absolutely need to pivot to Canada,” Ms. Joly said. “The Canadian steel makers are receiving phone calls from Canadian customers like never before.”
Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office said the province has lost more than 20,000 manufacturing jobs in the past two years, with most vanishing since Mr. Trump launched his tariff war early this year. The October decision by Stellantis NV to scrap plans to build the Jeep Compass EV in Brampton, Ont., has idled about 3,000 Canadian workers. Algoma Steel of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., is issuing layoff notices to 1,000 workers as the tariffs bite.
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Ms. Joly said that the government is preparing to launch a lawsuit against Stellantis for breach of a taxpayer-funded contract reached in 2022. The agreement handed the company up to $529-million, of which only $222-million has been dispersed, for work on the Jeep Compass factory in Brampton and a research site in Windsor, Ont. “We’re basically going after our money,” she said.
A 30-day mediation phase has concluded. The government has sent Stellantis a notice of default related to the jobs and funding agreement.
“Once the notice-of-default phase concludes in the new year, if Stellantis has not come up with a credible plan [for the Brampton plant], with a date, of course we will go ahead and hold them to account,” Ms. Joly said. “This is important, a message we’re sending to all companies that decide to leave the country that have received generous subsidies.”