Ottawa sends a message to Canada’s military: The days of automatically buying U.S. gear are over

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Peter Jones is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.

In May, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that the Swedish company Saab would be Canada’s preferred supplier for its surveillance aircraft. Last week, the government signed a preliminary agreement to purchase six of Saab’s GlobalEye planes, using Canadian-supplied Bombardier jets as the base.

The GlobalEye was one of three contenders for the multibillion-dollar contract. The other two were American.

Stories are now surfacing that the government did not wait for the military to issue its technical requirements, as would ordinarily be the process. Reportedly, Mr. Carney simply went ahead and announced that Saab was the winner. The decision apparently caught the Royal Canadian Air Force by surprise.

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There have been grumblings, too, that the Saab option does not meet the RCAF’s specifications – that its radars leave gaps in coverage, and that it lacks air-to-air refuelling for long missions in the Arctic. Saab has responded that the GlobalEye can be modified to meet these requirements. It’s also likely that no aircraft would have met all of them right out of the box.

But what is clear is that the Carney government is sending a message to the Canadian military: Industrial and political criteria are just as important as military ones.

In this case, the desire to build in Canada wherever possible appears to have won the day: Saab has announced that much of the work to convert the Bombardier jet on which the GlobalEye is based will be done in Canada, creating up to 3,600 jobs, as part of a much larger job-creation package of up to 12,000 if Canada also chooses to buy the Gripen fighter jet.

The Carney government also seems to be signalling that it will no longer accept the Canadian Armed Forces’ longstanding preference for American equipment. If historical precedent is anything to go by, had the RCAF been given the time to complete its technical requirements process it would almost certainly have announced that one of the American options was best.

Both of these points were confirmed by Stephen Fuhr, Canada’s secretary of state for defence procurement. “Are the requirements important? Of course they are,” he told the CBC. But “it’s not the only thing that needs to be considered here. We need to leverage this money to stimulate our own economy. We need to become more independent. We need to think about supply chains and relationships.”

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The GlobalEye decision is thus part of a much larger drama unfolding in the context of the government’s overarching desire to reduce Canada’s dependence on the United States. Other looming defence decisions will be affected. Given that Canada is embarking on the largest peacetime military build-up in its history, hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake here.

This will bring the Carney government into confrontations with its own military. After decades of close co-operation, Canada’s military has a deeply ingrained preference for the latest American equipment. Criteria that is supposedly purely technical will somehow always come out of a seemingly unbiased evaluation process in favour of the American option, and Canada’s military will then say that it won the competition, fair and square.

This state of affairs did not come from nowhere. Throughout the Cold War, it was logical to assume that Canada would only ever go into battle at the side of the United States. Having similar equipment made sense, and was not seen as a potential liability. Moreover, the Canadian military tends to view U.S. equipment as simply better; after all, the U.S. defence industry is bigger and better-funded than any other.

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Others dispute this, arguing that American equipment is often so technology-intensive that the expense and maintenance requirements (and therefore availability rates) are Achilles’ heels. The most sophisticated aircraft isn’t much use if you can only afford a few of them and they spend most of their time being serviced on the ground.

But the overriding political reality is that we now live in a world where Canadian and American interests are diverging. It is less and less likely that Canada will be signed up for American military excursions around the world. Rather, we will seek to work more closely with coalitions of other like-minded countries. Shifting equipment purchases makes increasing sense.

Others are going through the same process. NATO has decided on the GlobalEye to replace the aging fleet of American-built surveillance aircraft the Alliance maintains, as have the Netherlands, France and other countries.

Still, Canada’s military leadership will have difficulty adjusting to this. Expect more surprise announcements – and more grumbling – as Canada’s generals and admirals face the new reality.