Harper's $9 billion jets: boondoggle or blessing?

Nazis, communists, and Peter MacKay’s father help explain the controversial military expenditure.

The Conservatives kicked over a hornets’ nest last week when Stephen Harper’s communications director crowed to the press that Canadian jets had intercepted Russian bombers on a routine patrol in the Arctic, an apparent justification of the government’s recent decision to purchase 65 F-35 fighter jets from the Americans. The government announced the $9-billion purchase in July to much criticism, but talk of it had died down until the Conservatives invoked the threat of Cold War 2.0. Now the debate has been revived.

Scott Taylor of the Halifax Chronicle Herald blames the whole thing (rather unfairly, it must be said) on Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s father, speculating that when he put “young toddler Peter to bed back in the late 1960s, he must have invoked visions of evil Cold War Russians in his son’s head to put him to sleep.” This, and only this, he writes, can explain McKay and the Conservatives’ “phobic fear of all things Russian.”

Peter Worthington is skeptical that we need the F-35’s when the main duty of our current fleet of F-18’s seems to be to play chicken with Russian bombers on routine patrols. “While it’d be nice to be able to afford a state of the art air force,” he writes in the National Post, “it is not (or shouldn’t be) a top priority for a country with a limited military budget.” Why buy a Ferrari when a Subaru will do.

In the Globe and Mail J.L. Granatstein argues that having the best possible equipment is always essential because in an “unknowable future” our military needs are always unpredictable. “Who in 1990 or 2000 could have predicted that the Canadian Forces would be fighting a war in Afghanistan in 2010?” he writes. That unknowable future might include, after all, the second coming of certain dead German dictators. Critics say the age of air wars fought by jets is over, Granatstein says, but what if the critics are as “wrong as everyone who confidently declared that Hitler would stop once he had reincorporated the Rhineland back into Germany. What then?”