The F-35 or the Gripen?

Personally I would prefer Canada buy the Super Hornet but that is not an option.

In all of the arguments around which aircraft to buy the key issue is always, "which aircraft has the greater capabilities?" Proponents of the F-35 indicate that it is the more capable aircraft of the two and they are correct.

Unfortunately, that is the wrong question. The question is which aircraft can best meet all of the operational needs the Canadian Air Force? 

The F-35 cannot meet all of the requirements. This particular airframe was developed for a specific mission, namely the deep penetration of hostile airspace, to take out high value targets, and return alive. For this it is very well suited but for other tasks not so much. Which is the reason that most users of the F-35 have other 4th generation fighter and strike aircraft to back them up. Hell, even the US has not even suggested retiring any of the F-Teens aircraft and the cost of the F-35 is not the only reason why.

So can the Gripen meet the requirement? Not completely. It is a capable aircraft but it is still lacking, although if Canada is only going to buy one type the Gripen comes closest to being able to meet all of the operational needs of the Air Force.

Then you have to look at the politics. The simple fact is the US is no longer a reliable ally so buying aircraft from them is a huge risk, particularly when said aircraft requires the frequency and intensity of maintenance the F-35 requires. It is true that part of the deal to purchase the F-35 is the maintenance of them and that the supply chains for the manufacture and maintenance of them include Canadian companies. However, watching the current administration trample all over agreements when it suits them does anybody really believe the maintenance deals and supply chains are safe? If they are not then the Canadian Air Force would be left with a large number of useless pieces of junk very quickly.

On the other hand the Swedes have made all sorts of promises regarding the manufacturing of the Gripen here in Canada. It all sounds great but one of the reasons why they have made these promises is because they want to build the Gripens for the Ukraine war away from the combatants. The problem is, if the deal goes through, the first Gripens would not roll of the assembly line until the late 2020s, maybe early 2030s. By then the war in Ukraine will probably be concluded one way or another and that could change plans really quick.

So what is the answer? As I stated above most F-35 users have other aircraft to complement them and that is the approach the Canadian Air Force should take. We have already agreed to buy 16 F-35s from the US and that agreement should be honoured. However, Canada should not agree to buy any more, instead filling out the balance of their requirement with the Gripen. 

This approach would best meet all of the operational requirements of the Air Force while mitigating the risks associated with buying both airframes. It would provide the Canadian Air Force with its own deep penetration capability, which is very important in the changing geopolitical landscape, while better meeting all of the other requirements as well.

Some would argue that maintaining two aircraft would lead to logistical issues but I am old enough to remember when the CAF had the Voodoo, Starfighter and CF-5 and they had no problems with logistics. They can do it again and with the big influx of money going to the CAF maintaining two logistical chains would be a good way to spend that money.

I do not know how this will all finally shake out but I am hoping that someone in authority will start thinking outside of the self-imposed box they seem to have put themselves in and consider the idea of buying both types.

A short note on why I prefer the Super Hornet. We already use an earlier version of the Hornet so the transition would go alot smoother. As well, I remember when Canada purchased the Hornets. It was a competition between the F-16 and the F-18 in the early 80's. Canada eventually settled on the F-18 and one of the reasons was it has two engines. When we have to send a couple of fighters up to the Arctic to play with some Russian Bears they have to cross some of the most forbidding terrain in the world. If an aircraft loses its engine there you not only lose the aircraft but the pilot also has a very low chance of survival even if they successfully and safely eject from the plane. Having two engines mitigates that risk. If one fails the other will allow you to limp home. Of course, the instances of engine failures in modern aircraft is very low so it is not a huge issue but it is not negligible and it would only take the loss of one Gripen or F-35 to engine failure to create all sorts of questions of why we did not buy aircraft with two engines.

Will Pierre Poilievre Quit?

No, he will have to be pushed out, in January, by gaining less than 50% of the vote at the Conservative Party leadership review. If he wins more than 50% he will claim victory and hang on.

In all of the talk about the troubles in the CPC one thing is missing. The Liberals only had a 50/50 chance of winning the last election going into it. If it were not for the actions and words of the current US president, before and during the election campaign, the Liberals could very well have lost.

They did not and Mark Carney is enjoying a rather extended honeymoon, although the Liberal Party is not. That honeymoon will end. It is as inevitable as the sun setting tonight and when it does the Liberals will likely lose any subsequent election to the CPC. You see, the Liberals have been governing on borrowed time for a couple of years and historical voting patterns will make their loss virtually inevitable next time.

Pierre Poilievre knows this. I have questioned his political acumen and instincts in the past but even he has to see that the leader of the CPC will likely be PM after the next election. So if he is that leader he will be that PM. So he is going to hang on as hard as he can, despite the short term negative impacts that will have on the CPC. As an aside, others in the CPC, who have Prime Ministerial ambitions should know the same thing which is why I am surprised that campaigns to oust him have not been more prevalent.

Of course, his hanging on could shake loose more CPC MPs who decide to cross to the Liberals, giving them a majority government. While this would hurt Mr. Poilievre in the short term it would actually allow for more time for the positive aura around PM Carney to become tarnished. Or to put it another way, if we have an election within the next 12 to 18 months the Liberals still have a 50/50 chance of winning it. If the election takes place 4 years from now they have virtually no chance. So the short-term pain would actually be to his advantage in the long run.

I am not saying that Mr. Poilievre is play 4D chess and letting all of this happen as part of some master plan. He just wants to hang on because he likes the perks and he believes, rightly, that if he does he has a very good chance of becoming PM someday. 

There is the wildcard of CPC members not deserting to the Liberals but quitting the caucus and attempting to form a conservative alternative to the CPC. Perhaps an attempt to resurrect a progressive conservative party within Canada. I do not believe this is likely to happen or whether they would be successful if they attempted it but it cannot be discounted and if they do succeed then the next election could be very interesting.

So if he receives even a small majority of the vote in January he will claim victory and stay on as leader of the CPC. He will then try to rehabilitate his image. Incidentally, assuming he is able to do so or he just decides to wait until PM Carney's popularity starts to slide it will take time so I would not expect the CPC to bring down the government anytime soon. He will find a way to allow this government to continue until he believes he can win.

The Federal and Alberta Governments Make a Deal

Or more accurately the two governments have settled on a framework that could potentially lead to a new pipeline being built to the BC coast.

When I first read about it I asked the question: WTF is Mark Carney doing? 

Then I read the agreement, or Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and I have concluded that no pipeline will ever be built. The reason for that conclusion is the MOU specifically states that the funding for such a pipeline has to come from the private sector and that those very same companies will have to come to an agreement with all of the potentially impacted indigenous peoples to build it.

At this time I can confidently state that this is not going to happen. The biggest reason is there is no business case for a new pipeline. There has not been one for over a decade, whether you are talking about one to the Pacific, Churchill or points east. Most oil and gas industry analysts, who do not work for the industry, are indicating that oil and gas demand, and therefore prices, will permanently decrease by the end of this decade. So considering it will take at least that long to have a pipeline approved, even with the new approval process in the Build Canada Act, and built, that the pipeline will never show a profit. No profit, no business case, no pipeline.

The MOU also holds out the possibility of revoking the tanker ban, although the language around the conditions to do so is quite convoluted, but again private interests will make that meaningless. The waters that the tankers would have to go through to pick up the oil are very treacherous and no insurance company would insure a tanker going through them. Without insurance the tanker company would be on the hook for the entirety of the liability for any accident and they will not accept that risk.

So in the end the MOU is virtually meaningless.

Of course, there has been alot of talk about how the MOU has put the ball into Danielle Smith's court, taking away a bone of contention that she could use to fire up her base and hang on to power. I am not going to repeat all of that here, although I will disagree on two points.

The first point is the peace between Ottawa and Alberta will be short lived. The next battle will be Alberta demanding that Ottawa put up a substantial amount of money to build the pipeline. Danielle Smith promised her voters a pipeline, the private sector is not going to step up to build it, which will leave governments to foot the bill. Alberta does not have the financial wherewithal to do it alone so they will eventually get around to demanding Ottawa to kick in, which means most of the cost. 

The second point is this MOU will not help the Liberals in any way with Alberta voters during an election. During the next election the Liberals will most likely lose seats in Alberta instead of gain any. That was true before the MOU was signed and it is still true.

So in the end it is status quo. There will be relative peace between the two governments for a short period but the Alberta government will go back to blaming Ottawa for all of the ills in the province because that is what provincial governments do when they shit the bed. No pipeline will be built, without governments paying for it. The Liberals will lose seats in the next federal election. 

Who Cares?

With that question PM Carney voiced the frustration that most Canadians are feeling with regard to Donald Trump and his administration. 

Then he followed it up by stating that it was a poor choice of words.

I do wonder if it was as much an off-the-cuff question or whether the whole thing was calculated. 

That sentiment would resonate with most Canadians. The Conservatives, ever predictable, decided to try to make political hay from it and then he walked it back making them look kind of silly and reminding Canadians that when it comes to Donald Trump there is some doubt the CPC can be trusted to fight for Canadian interests.

Or the put it another way the Conservatives failed to read the room yet again. That should come as no surprise. After all there was a poll that came out a few weeks ago that indicated that a large majority of Canadians are very unhappy about what Donald Trump is doing. It indicated that over 80% of non-Conservatives were unhappy but only around 50% of Conservative were unhappy. That is, around 50% of Conservatives are quite happy with what Donald Trump is doing. The Conservatives appealing to their base at the cost of appealing to the broader electorate has become the MO in the last few years. Maybe they believe it will eventually win them an election, and they could be right, but I do know that appealing to a broader audience would almost guarantee them a victory. However, as a Liberal supporter I hope they keep doing what they are doing. It decreases their chances of winning.

The old "elbows up" never meant that the government would fight the Trump administration on everything. It was always going to be about picking their spots. The PM did just that in South Africa this week.

Nicely done. 

Surprising No One Budget 2025 Was Passed

Why does the political class actually believe Canadians really care about the minutiae of what happens in Parliament?

I am one of those who follows politics pretty closely. So here is a brief summary of how the budget was passed:

The Liberals did not give a damn whether it passed or not. They were the only party that was poised to benefit from an election and they also knew that two of their opponents wanted desperately to avoid one.

The Bloc did not want an election either but they were not as desperate so they decided to vote against, knowing it would not come back to bite them on the ass.

Elizabeth May managed to win vague assurances from the PM, providing her with the political cover to vote for the budget.

The Conservatives and the NDP desperately wanted to avoid an election but they did not want to be seen supporting the budget either. So they took the half-assed approach of making certain that not enough of their members voted to ensure their votes did not exceed that of the Liberals and Greens. Hell, the Conservatives literally had two of their senior members hide behind curtains in the House so that they could quickly move into their seats to vote once the outcome was known.

All of this is very interesting and both amateur and professional political commentators have been in a tizzy since it happened.

Monday night, after the vote, I went to my non-political wife to tell her the results. She had seen in the news the week before that there was a confidence vote that could trigger another election. She asked me if we were going to have an election and I said no.

So, when I went to tell her I began giving her the above summary. She stopped me very early and asked "Is there going to be an election?" 

I said "No."

"Good"

"Don't you want to hear the details?"

"No."

And we have not spoken about it since.

For years my wife has reminded me that most Canadians do not care about politics to the point where some do not ever bother to vote. And those that do care tend to have already chosen a side and nothing that happens will probably change that.

So the Conservatives and the NDP twisting themselves into knots Monday night was all for naught. It was a complete waste of time.

The 2025 Canadian Federal Budget

Having read the budget I can say that it did not surprise me. It does not contain any of the poison pills that the opposition was talking about a couple of weeks ago and it is not the progressive budget it would have been if PMJT was still the head of the Canadian government. I stated in this space a few months ago that PMMC would have fit in quite well in the Progressive Conservative cabinet of Joe Clark and this budget proves it. Make no mistake that this is a progressive conservative budget.

As with all progressive conservatives, and all conservatives for that matter, they talk a good game with regard to reducing deficits but when push comes to shove they fail as much as non-conservative governments. This budget did not buck that trend. The actual number given for the deficit this year is an eye catcher but as some have noted if you account for inflation it is no bigger than the average deficit from the last 50 years. At any rate, the usual deficit hawks are loudly condemning the Federal deficit, from a Liberal government, but as usual they are dead silent about the deficits, and some rather egregious mishandling of taxpayers money, from Conservative provincial governments. I am certain that must be a coincidence.

What makes the current deficit a progressive conservative one instead of a conservative one is it is being created by investing in stuff Canada needs. They are borrowing money for big projects and the military instead of just borrowing money to transfer it to the wealthy in the form of tax breaks, which is what the last federal Conservative government did several times in their nine years in power. A progressive budget would have borrowed money to give to ordinary Canadians, who we are told are going through an "affordability crisis".

The amount of money involved is quite impressive and it cannot have anything but a positive impact on overall economic activity. That is not to say that its impact will always be positive but overall it probably will.

My biggest beef with the budget is its measures to shrink the public service. It does not make sense to plan to invest billions but also get rid of the people who will be required to make certain the money is being spent as intended. After all, when this kind of money is being talked about it is inevitable that some will wind up where is should not be. You need people to keep that to a minimum but that is harder to do if you are giving the people charged with doing that pink slips.

As well, these periodic reductions in the size of the public service have always been shell games. Certainly they reduce the size of the public service, for about a month, maybe six. Then the government departments go back to hiring more staff because they realize that they need them. Oftentimes the staff they hire back are those that left during the workforce reduction. When you add that most staff reductions take place as a result of people taking incentive packages to volunteer to leave what really happens is the government gives many employees months long paid vacations.

Really these workforce reductions are just a publicity stunt and it is disappointing that the current government is doing this. I would have thought that a former Bank Governor would be able to figure this out and approach workforce reduction if a different and sustainable way.

I cannot speak about the budget without talking about how it has discombobulated the Conservative Party. It is probably not the reason for their current troubles but it seems to have been a catalyst for the unrest in the party that was inevitable after their election loss in April and Pierre Poilievre' s refusal to step down as leader of the CPC. These things do not go way quickly so it will be interesting to see how this all finally shakes out.

For a first budget I cannot say I am surprised by it. It is certainly ambitious and if they achieve even half of what it sets out to do then it could very well be the transformative budget the Liberals are selling it as. However, there is alot of time and politics to go before we will begin to see this transformation so I would not get too excited about it yet.

I would be very surprised if this budget caused the government to fall and trigger an election. If I am the opposition parties I do not want to piss off the electorate by triggering an early election and fight said election against this budget. Stranger thing have happened so we will have to wait and see but I believe you do not need to worry about campaigning in the snow.

Will There Be An Election in the Fall of 2025?

Short answer: No.

Not so short answer: Anything is possible when it comes to politics but no.

I resolved to stop commenting on the day-to-day silliness of politics in this country awhile ago but the current speculation about a Fall election is just too ridiculous for me to ignore.

The budget will be released on November 4 and the idea it will be defeated and a snap election will occur as a result is getting some media play. This is not surprising of course. Such speculation is worth more than a few eyeballs staring at screens and newsprint and a few clicks on the internet. Or to put it another way it is good for the news business.

The crux of the speculation is the media stating the government is indicating they do not have the votes to pass the budget and the opposition has not stated whether they will support it. Very serious stuff until you apply just a little critical thinking. We have a minority government so, by definition, it does not have the votes to pass the budget on its own. As well, since the budget has not yet been released the opposition parties are not going to decide how they will vote just yet. They will posture and try to maneuver for short-term political advantage but that is to be expected and nothing extraordinary.

So when the budget is released does it mean they will decide to vote against budget and trigger an election?

Well let's look at it from the perspective of all of the parties.

The honeymoon for the Liberals is over, but only by a few weeks, but the honeymoon for Mark Carney continues. He is still the most popular and trusted politicians at the federal level. In our increasingly Americanized politics, where party leaders are the main focus over party and policy, that gives the Liberals a huge advantage. To put it another way, the Liberals do not want an election but they are not afraid of having one. None of the other parties can say the same.

The Conservative Party is lead by a leader who has been severely damaged by the events of the last 6 months. That is something that Conservatives and the media just do not seem to want to admit. Pierre Poilievre lost an election everybody believed he was going to win less than a year ago, losing his own seat in the process. Yes, his party picked up seats but they were unable to prevent the Liberals from gaining seats too, almost to the point of achieving majority government status. Mr. Poilievre is going to need time to rehabilitate his image, if he can and assuming he comes through the leadership review in January, before he challenges for the PM's chair again. He will only get one more chance to do just that so he will want much more favourable conditions before taking that chance.

The NDP is in an existential crisis. They are leaderless, beyond broke and have no party identity to speak of. An election now would result in two outcomes. They would lose what remaining seats they have and be wiped out as a political force at the federal level. Or they would pick up a few more seats, maybe getting back to official party status, but they would be so deep in debt that they would need to declare bankruptcy leading to their elimination as a political force at the federal level in a year or two. Either way, an election now would lead to their destruction. They need time to choose a leader, renew their party and make some money. An election now would prevent all three.

The Bloc cannot gain anymore seats in Quebec. They are at their high water mark. However, the Spring election showed them that they can lose seats in Quebec. So they find themselves in a position where an election will not benefit them with a larger seat count and where an election right now runs the risk of them losing seats. For the Bloc the status quo is in their best interest, at least for now.

So none of the opposition parties are really in a position to fight an election. Their risk of losing more is higher than their chances of making gains. As well, if you add the displeasure voters would have with having to go to the polls less than a year after doing so in the Spring it increases the risk. The election would be fought on who triggered the election and if they vote against the budget it would be a hard sell to say anybody else besides the opposition parties would be responsible. That would provide the Liberals the opportunity to secure the majority they just missed in April.

So in the end the government will table their budget, the opposition parties will shit on it, because that is what opposition parties do, but they will find a way not to defeat the budget in the end. The budget will probably not have any poison pills. It will be different from budgets the Trudeau Liberals used to table but not egregiously so. In the end one of the other parties will say they can support it and that will be that. My guess is it will be the Bloc.

Of course, this assumes that the opposition parties have remotely competent political strategists working for them. If not, then all bets are off.