From a very practical PoV, the only military threat to Canada is from the U.S.
Even if the U.S. and Canada are enemies, if Canada is being attacked by a country that is not the U.S., then the U.S. will come to its defense because they don’t want another nation with the capability to attack Canada to have a North American presence.
So given that the U.S. is the only possible military threat to the U.S., and now that the U.S. has openly threatened Canada, it’s incredibly silly to buy weaponry from the only country that could militarily attack you and almost certainly won’t share repair material, parts, software source etc. and possibly has a kill switch.
The E-7 Wedgetail is a vastly more capable platform than the Erieye/GlobalEye in pretty much every way, but costs four times as much, and there are other issues with Canada and Boeing as have been pointed out by another commenter.
Delivery schedules are also likely a factor. Assuming the USAF actually orders the E-7, they'll probably get first priority on the Boeing production line. Any export orders would have to wait.
>The E-7 Wedgetail is a vastly more capable platform than the Erieye/GlobalEye in pretty much every way
The airframe itself, perhaps. As for the radar, that remains to be seen. The E-7 uses an L-band AESA radar, whereas the GlobalEye's radar operates in the higher-frequency S-band. In general, higher frequencies are better for engaging smaller/faster targets, but perform worse in adverse weather conditions.
It's been a long time since I took my electronic warfare courses, but in a situation where the radar is expected to spot small drones and other targets I would prefer a higher frequency radar.
It should be noted that the US military itself didn't want the Wedgetail in favor of a space-based solution, until Hegseth forced them for publicity reasons.
Was it just a publicity issue? There was a real risk of a capability gap in that all of the old E-3 airframes would have to be retired long before a space based solution could possibility come online. Plus in an era of anti-satellite weapons proliferation, a crewed aircraft might actually turn out to be more survivable.
The comparable aircraft is the more modern E-7 Wedgetail, which has many features that are superior for Canada's use case (notably including range and NORAD integration). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-7_Wedgetail
Canada has unfortunately been in conflict with Boeing since before either of Trump's terms, originally triggered by Boeing's trade complaints regarding Bombardier's government subsidies.
I'd mention that whether a piece of tech can beat another one on one is a consideration but a larger concern is how maintainable your fleet is. Canada is specifically moving to grow ties with the EU (and has joined their defense industry network) which really incentivizes having a fleet that is a similar makeup to other European countries.
The tariffs and international unpredictability of the US is one motivator - but growing closer to EU markets is also a specific focus of the Carney government. The current Trump administration isn't even the only rationale for this - in 2017 the US imposed extremely heavy tariffs on Bombardier that bankrupted the majority of the corporation.
I like this analogy - sparring with each other like toddlers do, before realizing that they have a lot in common as they age, like the English language, industrialization, the systemic abuse of natives, Big Oil, the World Wars and racism.
Now that they're older, they're sparring once again, just like siblings do over the parents' estate.
This is terrible analogy. We're more like neighbours, and US is a bully. We made a decision not to have much a fence before we were friendly neighbours. We regret that decision, and are planting a hedge and reaching out to our other "neighbours" for support.
The whole neighbourhood thinks you're assholes and bullies, we're all scared. But that is bring us closer together as result, so there's some upside.
Racism? Oh man, visit any other country that is more homogenous.... lol. Everything is relative.
Canadian and American racism is documented in specific events, unlike in other countries. I'd be hard pressed to find specific racism-driven events in Poland or Czechia, even though they top the racist charts.
I'm not American so your second point is completely moot.
Sir, Nawrocki is only the president because of racist pressures. I don't even hate him but you cannot argue that he would be elected if it weren't for fear of foreigners.
Because Trump is a new, and (hopefully!) a one time phenomenon.
He is unique in that he seems to have absolute control over the Republican base which makes all internal party checks fail. The rest is provided by a hyper polarized media landscape and a conservative supreme court majority that seems to be open to radical upheavals. The combination of all three has rendered the constitutional safe guards ineffective. In other words, we seem to have run into an edge case in the US constitution.
The supreme court won't change materially in the near future and likely the polarization will continue, but it's hard to image someone in the future with such an absolute grip on either party. So, hopefully a soft restart of the system in 2028 will be the last of this edge case for a while. That's the hope, anyway!
The two countries have far more in common shared interests than differences, so odds are things will drift back to normal in the future.
Trump did not rise to power in isolation. He has not remained in isolation while in power. Voter support for Trump is still reasonably strong, and Trump and his supporters have ensured that the mechanisms of Government are packed with loyalists.
America chose this. America continues to tolerate this. America enabled this.
This isn't something that Trump can be scapegoated for. This is what many Americans wanted, or at the very least, it is what many Americans are willing to tolerate.
The trade deficit with Canada is because Americans are buying Canadian products.
Enough Canadians (seriously, the vast majority) live close enough to the border that they could make a weekly trip to the USA and purchase American dairy and other American goods. In fact, prior to the tariffs many Canadians did make regular shopping trips across the border.
So let's be clear: we were buying your products to the extent we wanted to, already.
As someone unfamiliar with the US-Canada trade relationship, it would be helpful if you developed this argument instead of stating it as a fact. I'm not well-placed to know whether your belief that Canada has bilked the US out of 46 billion dollars is well-founded or not.
> Because Trump is a new, and (hopefully!) a one time phenomenon.
unless the US extinguishes all of its billionaires and somehow convinces 1/3 to 1/2 of their population to not vote against their own interests it'll happen again
> He is unique in that he seems to have absolute control over the Republican base which makes all internal party checks fail. The rest is provided by a hyper polarized media landscape and a conservative supreme court majority that seems to be open to radical upheavals. The combination of all three has rendered the constitutional safe guards ineffective. In other words, we seem to have run into an edge case in the US constitution.
The US constitution has absolutely nothing at all to say about political parties or the particular state of the media landscape, or for that matter the partisan alignment of justices of the supreme court. It's incoherent to suggest that there are "constitutional safe guards" that should have prevented the election of a president (or the exercise of power by that president), who is supported by about one-half of a very polarized electorate and opposed by a separate one-half. Everything about the Trump presidency is as constitutional as every previous US presidency, including the phenomenon of opponents of the president trying to claim that specific things they do are or should be unconstitutional.
Why trust anyone? Really what stops a Trump from getting elected anywhere else? The citizens seem smarter or less bigoted? Are you sure that will always be the case given the agitprop in every form of media and internet communication in every language on earth?
There have been many elections in many political entities where a politician got elected because one group of citizens really liked that politician; and another group of citizens thought that politician was extremely, historically bad. This is inherent to mass democracy itself in any polity where there are real and deep-seated differences between different groups of the electorate. "A Trump" - in the sense of a politician whose opponents describe in apocalyptic terms and consider that politician's supporters to be stupid and bigoted - gets elected all the time in all sorts of places.
> Genuinely, what makes the US untrustworthy if not Trump?
We invaded Korea, and then Vietnam, and a few hundred other interventions that don't seem to be sanctioned by the international community. All because of a hardon for ideology that doesn't seem to actually reflect the interests of the people who live here.
Israel seems trustworthy in the sense that their priorities and aims are abundantly clear to everyone. People are pissed about Israel for Iran right now, but, I mean, there is a reason why they are attacking Iran right now and not Egypt or Turkey. You go about and poke the bear like Iran has done for decades with Israel, you get these outcomes. Egypt tried to poke the bear but that was decades ago and they've since learned there is nothing to gain there.
Nobody is buying this narrative of Israel being provoked, because the reaction to the provocation, if there ever was one, is completely disproportional.
Israel had settlements in Palestine way before the conflict outbreak, and nothing explains the systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure on Lebanon but for Israel just going supernova, like Germany and Japan back then.
Hey that's up to you. I will never vote for a person who supports Israel. Our parents may have been retarded but we don't have to be. I just see a state devoted to slaughtering as many people as they can. Iran looks like a saint compared to them.
I'm not supportive of them either. I just don't consider them untrustworthy though. Everything they do is exactly what they've always done since that state was formed. Easily the most predictable nation on earth, Israel. Easy way to get Israel off your back though? Stop funding terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah that inevitably do something stupid to provoke the Israelis into armed conflict. It is really that simple.
True. Israel begins, Israel assassinates and complains about being targeted by terrorism. Israel begins the loop again. What is more reliable than Israel?
Iran would be a better ally. China would be a better ally. Fucking Russia would be a better ally. Why did we decide to die on the hills of (loosely translated, I guess) mageddo?
But instead our state leans into exterminating people because our PR team was inspired by Goebbels and was trained to hate muslims
It is like a modern day state of Prussia. A beachhead and airstrip in the middle east. Weapons manufacturing. Rocket science. A cyber security firm. An intelligence agency. Some of the best in the world at these things. All wrapped up into one. This is why nations like to ally with Israel.
But again, if you don't want problems with Israel don't make problems with Israel. Their populace is militarized like few other and seemingly with a lot of political cohesion. Egypt has learned not to poke the bear. So has Jordan.
You missed the absolutely huge one: that the plane it's based around is a Bombardier aircraft manufactured here in Canada.
And in general this is how Saab has tried to court us -- by making promises (how real is unclear) to bring manufacturing jobs to Canada to build things.
That is something the US has not done, will not do, and most importantly cannot do under Trump/Bissent/etc.
Canada is very unlikely to be invaded, so the actual military effectiveness / superiority is only one factor. Reducing unemployment and enhancing our manufacturing sector is as or more important.
> You seem to have a few of your own: "Canada only has to patrol its northern border"
the Canadians do not aggressively patrol the southern border because that is where all of the people are -- unlike the north -- and because the reality is that the entire Canadian military is basically a speedbump for if/when the US invaded in earnest.
> You seem to have a few of your own: "Canada only has to patrol its northern border"
Another belief I hold is that you didn't care to click the link or read past the title because it literally states "aircraft to patrol Arctic territory" in bold font in the sub-heading.
You're being deliberately obtuse with nothing constructive to add to this discussion.
Open a history book. They do a lot more than patrol the northern border. Canada was involved in WWI, WWII, Korea, Iraq 1 and 2, Fall of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libyan civil war, Iraq civil war, Syrian civil war and ISIS conflict, Yemeni civil war, and a smattering of other conflicts over the past century.
Canada would only have to patrol its southern Alberta border /s
No coincidence that Albertans are sparking up the seceding issue again. When 10% of the population produces nearly 20% of the country's GDP it's a breeding ground for contempt. And it also seems like Albertans are the butt of a lot of jokes from the other Canadians anyway.
I'm sure this US government would love to see an "independent" Alberta.
Texas has entertained the idea of seceding for 150 years. And they would be a G7 country if they did. But they would have to fight a war to do it. USA already went through this once.
The only thing really stopping Alberta from leaving is whether or not BC, Ontario, and Quebec are willing to fight a war to stop it.
And that gets a lot more complicated if the US also wants Alberta to go independent....
Texas would be a G7 nation for about a week if they seceded from the US. Being the logistics hub for a country only works if you’re part of that country.
The instant Alberta secedes from Canada, the Indigenous would secede all unceded Treaty land from the independent Alberta. Which includes all of the tar sands, the source of Alberta's wealth.
Canada might not be willing to fight, but the Indigenous probably are.
None of this matters in this context. The indiginous people literally do not matter. It's bad, but it's just how it is when white Europeans start fighting over land in North America. We have 3 centuries of evidence.
We already have a clause in our constitution to allow for orderly withdrawal from Canada. We'd have to resolve the first Nations angle which would probably be more of a hurdle.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say if Canada wasn't willing to let Quebec leave, and they've tried with significantly more effort than Alberta ever has, then they're not going to let Alberta go.
>The only thing really stopping Alberta from leaving is whether or not BC, Ontario, and Quebec are willing to fight a war to stop it.
Unlike the individual US states, Alberta never joined Canada. It was not an entity that existed prior to Canada's confederation. Alberta was basically pencil-whipped into existence by carving out a chunk of an already existing territory (the Northwest Territory).
Despite American and Russian destabilization campaigns in Canada, there is no legal mechanism by which Canadian provinces can unilaterally secede.
>And that gets a lot more complicated if the US also wants Alberta to go independent....
Recent past polling overwhelmingly showed Albertans in favor of remaining in Canada. This latest frenzy is widely known to be a foreign influence operation.
The implication that this somehow weakens Alberta’s constitutional status is false. Alberta is a full province under the Constitution of Canada with the same constitutional standing as the other provinces.
The Supreme Court has already ruled that Canada and other provinces would be obligated to negotiate terms of separation should a province ever vote to leave in a clear referendum.
Yes, support for leaving is probably at 10-20%. Just having the referendum will build the infrastructure and political machinery for keeping it alive for a long time from the first try. I live here and I'm not a fan of Smith for encouraging it at all.
>The implication that this somehow weakens Alberta’s constitutional status is false.
I implied no such thing. In fact I was careful to use the term "unilaterally" when referring to secession. My understanding is doing it properly would require a full constitutional amendment.
>Albertans can just declare that they don't respect Ottawa's authority, right?
Sure, but just like nobody gives a shit about what Sovereign Citizens do or do not respect, such a declaration would only carry weight if there are enough people that want to mount an armed rebellion. And despite what American influence operations would have you believe, there simply aren't. Most Albertans want to remain in Canada.
Did you watch this video? About half way through he confirms that Alberta has the highest GDP/capita in Canada and is the largest (per capita) tax contributor. Ontario is obviously larger in absolute terms, but it has at least 4x the population.
As with any time you deploy an average... (And I'd expect better on this forum of all places)
Show me the distribution. Show me the median not just the mean. Show me the standard deviation.
Otherwise ... abused.
Yes, we all know oil is an extremely profitable (and environmentally destructive) commodity. That doesn't make the typical Albertans somehow responsible for holding up all of confederation. Just means oil is making some people very rich. For now.
I'm from there and my family is in Alberta. I can tell you now that the oil industry ain't doing jack squat for them.
You're right but you should cite something other than the CBC, since it will just be immediately dismissed by the biased as biased.
Alberta is very important economically. I'm from there. Ontario (I live there) and Quebec and BC are also massively important. And fanning the flames of disinformation and playing grievance politics to make Albertans feel discriminated against has become an extremely serious problem.
Wab Kinew was very eloquent on this topic yesterday.
I would think Ontario is the centre of Canada as it has the most people and the financial centre. Google's AI says 38% of GDP. And the problem Alberta faces is who wants to separate, what do they want to do afterwards and what ground do they actually own (vs. treaties that predate Alberta).
When Alberta at least catches up to Quebec in practicing being independent (runs its own police, collects its own taxes, has its own pension system, maintains foreign services, ... They might decide the extra taxes to pay for such is less "fun". And they need a border to ship stuff through.
That's not the injustice. The problem is that Alberta's political interests are very poorly (if at all) represented federally. This has come to a head a few times in the past with things like cancelled pipeline projects or the NEP[1]. So the issue is that Alberta has 11.52% of the population, contributes 15.25% of the GDP, yet must constantly fight against policies that put it at a disadvantage or run counter to its political leanings.
> Estimates have placed Alberta's losses between $50 billion and $100 billion because of the NEP.[32][33] Alberta still initially enjoyed an economic surplus due to high oil prices, but the surplus was heavily reduced by the NEP, which, in turn, stymied many of Lougheed's policies for economic diversification to reduce Alberta's dependence on the cyclical energy industry, such as the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, and also left the province with an infrastructure deficit. In particular, the Alberta Heritage Fund was meant to save as much of the earnings during high oil prices to act as a "rainy day" cushion if oil prices collapsed because of the cyclical nature of the oil and gas industry.
Cancelled pipeline projects? Ottawa doesn't cancel pipeline projects. All the problems with pipeline projects are caused by environmental reviews etc, which fall under legislation brought in by Stephen Harper, an Albertan.
It's much the opposite, Canada just spent $34B to ensure the Trans-Mountain pipeline got built. Alberta is the one that gets the resource revenue, but it's Ottawa that has to pay for your pipelines. That's hardly fair.
Alberta has one legitimate grievance, the NEP. Which is a plan that was cancelled by Mulroney over 40 years ago.
The AHSTF performed poorly because successive Albertan provincial governments slashed contributions to it, not because of the ghost of the NEP. It was established in 1976, then contributions were cut in half in 1983, and eliminated entirely in 1987. The NEP was gone by 1985.
What hurt Alberta was every cyclical crash in oil prices, and their steadfast refusal to implement additional revenue streams like a provincial sales tax while spending instead of saving their resource-boom surpluses.
Of course the US gov would love to see an "independent" Alberta... They'd see that as easy oil reserves to put their hands on and a weaker Canada. They're working with traitors in separatist organizations as well as PP and trying to import MAGA into Canada.. Albertan's, due solely to their location, stand on oil riches... They don't have to do much to be the country's highest earners, its literally handed to them on a sticky black oil platter. (Not saying they don't work hard... loads of people work just as hard in other fields that aren't covered in gold though). They have the highest median pay in Canada, pay the least taxes.. Yet still spend their time crying and saying they're keeping Canada afloat... They're not Canada's highest GDP province... And other provinces don't spend their time trying to sell out to the US, even after the US threatening to destroy Canada, economically or otherwise. That's treason my guy. There's not too many ways to say it. Also, Alberta's population isn't even close to having the votes to even considering separating, without getting into all the other issues they're trying to pretend don't matter. The whole thing is a joke.
What is stopping the Swedes from electing a jackass? They seem smart for now? It happens in Europe too. All these weaknesses are liable for any country in a democratic model where executive is controlled via popular vote. Population is trivial to manipulate. This is the new world. Running to Sweden doesn't change the underlying issue of the ease of manipulating an electorate using technological affordances to capture a nation from the inside without a single shot fired.
It can happen in Sweden too but it is less likely to. We don't have a president, we have a prime minister with limited power. We have a stronger democracy run by coalitions instead of a single party. One jackass is not enough in Sweden.
Nothing, but when your spouse turns into an abusive piece of shit, breaking up with them and looking for a new one is the right call.
Sure, the new one might turn into one too, but that's no reason to stay with one who is definitely one.
Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback. That's the obvious result of Trumpism - when you seek to turn every interaction into a short-term win for you, people simply stop doing business with you whenever they can avoid it.
Tens of millions of Americans voted for this guy three times, overwhelmingly twice - this is how the country wants to act.
If he and his cronies are removed from power and prosecuted and everyone pinkie swears to never go down this road again, maybe we can look into rebuilding some of that trust. In the meantime, you reap what you sow.
Run from the US. Create a new seat of power all you want. Putin will put in his manchurian candidate wherever the power lies. The fact this happened to the US is really a byproduct of its global position. So create a new global leader, and that will be the new target for capture via propagandizing the electorate and electing a sympathizer. Running never solves anything. The problem is still the problem, and is not getting addressed.
Democracy in the US is sick at the best of times. It's a fundamental flaw in strong executive presidential republics, doubled down on by the legislatures ability to constantly redistrict in a way that advantages the incumbents, tripled down on by the lack of a plausible mechanism to have a non-confidence motion.
Canada can't solve this problem inside US politics. Only Americans can, at any one of the three boxes. It can only work to disentangle it's critical dependencies, and to protect its own interests.
And democracy isn't sick in the UK that elected conservatives to leave from the EU? It isn't sick in Hungary that elected Orban? It isn't sick in Germany where 1/4 of the bundestag is comprised of AfD? Far right is rising in Canada too in recent years (1).
Citing one bad election or referendum, and another country that just had a complete political upheaval that has blown up in our good friend Orban's face, and a third that's up in the air isn't as strong an argument as you would hope it to be.
Any country can elect chucklefucks or vote for something stupid. Some of them have systems that are more resistant to the long-term damage they cause. Some of them are less. The US is definitely in the 'less' category as all of the checks and balances and systemic inertia completely collapsed.
Also, the other big difference is that when Hungary or the UK sneezes, Canada doesn't catch a cold.
Alright, if you think that the world is someone inoculated against this, I'm not sure what else to say. I just don't believe that at all. Humans are fungible and Americans aren't uniquely stupid.
This is actually more likely a non-political procurement decision that looks like a political one.
This is the 'right size' for Canada and other nations - the US doesn't offer a true comparable, and, looks like the US balked at buying the 'kind of comparable' Boeing E7 putting it in jeopardy.
With European military renaissance and the SAAB gear proving itself in Ukraine ... well, you see the shift.
This is the shift writ large.
This is going to happen across all industries.
I don't think it's going to 'fundamentally' alter the landscape, but it will be a shift we don't come back from.
In the past countries would buy American equipment even if it wasn’t the best fit because that would make you essentially an American ally. Being part of the U.S. ecosystem was valuable.
Unfortunately, over the last 1.5 years, the political value proposition has turned by 180 degrees.
- Being a U.S. ally no longer guarantees that you will be protected by the U.S. as Ukraine is seeing. But the U.S. has been tearing agreements left and right and the President has openly said he may not respond to a valid Article 5 invocation.
- Being a U.S. ally seems to bring even more threats from the U.S. as Canada and Europe are seeing
- Being a U.S. ally is no guarantee of protection even if you literally host American bases like the gulf countries are seeing. In fact, it’s only made them a target and the U.S. prioritized protecting Israel entirely over protecting any of the Gulf states.
The value proposition for buying U.S. weapons has become really bad at this point.
>As of March 31st, 2026, Airbus reported a commercial aircraft backlog of 9,031 aircraft. Based on the company’s 2026 delivery target of 870 aircraft, this represents approximately 10.4 years of production coverage.
>Boeing’s commercial backlog stood at approximately 6,719 aircraft at the end of March. Using Forecast International’s production estimates, Boeing’s backlog equates to roughly 10.1 years of production coverage.
They do not mean that the people who ordered them today are wanting them today. If you need them in 10 years time, you need to order them today. It can easily change, if a flight company doesnt want to do business with Boeing or Airbus, they can cancel their pre-orders. Then the pre-order list might shrink really fast.
Indeed. Backlogs can evaporate. Can you imagine anyone taking delivery of a newly built 737 in 10 years? 7 years? Theoretically, that's part of the backlog.
Why not taking delivery of a current plane in 7 years? What do you think the development, testing, certification and production scaling timeline is of a brand new airframe?
> Can you imagine anyone taking delivery of a newly built 737 in 10 years?
..yes? Companies are still placing orders, despite knowing how long the backlog is. I also expect the 737s will still be sold in 20+ years time, much less 7-10.
Worth noting that the base plane for one of the US-based contenders, the Aeris X by L3Harris, would also be the same Bombardier Global 6500 business jet.
Or, consider that the smaller Saab better fits the mission profile for Canada, and may be cheaper to operate, all the while The Guardian is furiously beating off trying to turn this into a bigger story than it really is.
Unfortunately, there is nothing in the US system (as far as I can see) that prevents Trump-like behaviour being the new standard. There were three supposedly independent, contentious branches of Government. One is inert (legislature), one enabled Trump (SCOTUS) and the third, of course, is Trump. I am unaware of any mechanism that can change things.
Trump-like behavior isn't the inevitable result of the US System though. We could've had another 20 presidents in a row who didn't go and break the norm of maintaining global alliances and not threatening to invade our neighbors and closest allies constantly.
So it's relevant to ask if this would still be happening without Trumps antics, even isolationists like JD Vance wouldn't force our allies hands like this.
There is also the fourth - the press, which is either actively cheerleading him, or sanewashing every insane thing be does, or walks an eggshells around him.
Obviously not. Canada would gladly have kept paying 2x market prices just to stay in the good graces of the US, with a presumption of 'free' defense in exchange for paying so much.
This era is over. US defense companies now need to compete for real.
Without the second election of Trump? It's likely. Canada's aircraft industry got majorly burned by the US in 2017 during his first administration and Biden didn't significantly reverse the impact in any way.
I feel a deep sense of pride and hope, palpably in my chest, when I get a week of news about how we're developing much closer ties with our European allies and divesting ourselves of the abusive American relationship.
Carney's Davos speech was powerful, but those words needed to be followed by actions, which I think we are seeing. I'm used to being so disappointed by politicians.
Over the last few months we've seen announcements of shifts from US-based supply chains to non-US-supply chains. As an American, I think this is prudent, based on what has happened in the last year and change. The US is no longer a reliable partner and this is what you do when that happens.
100 years from now, the last 15 months will be written about in no uncertain terms: this administration has loaded many footguns and pulled the trigger, over ideologies which are just plain stupid. "America First" indeed. Soft power is power. "Forever" wars are wars we shouldn't be in. Retribution by POTUS acting like a 5 year old is disgusting no matter what party that person came from.
It will take decades to recover from what has and will happen during this administration's run. Let's hope the power they have ends in November 2026 and not Nov 2028.
How exactly is that related to their point about nations moving to alternative supply chains away from US based ones? They're saying the administrations actions are counterproductive, and driving away both money and influence from their allies.
And yes, most consumer goods from everywhere come from a Chinese supply chain ... but we're not talking about consumer goods here. We're talking in this case about military purchases. There aren't many western countries buying military hardware from China.
The supply chain of relevance is the critical software, infrastructure to run it, and ability to remotely kill it if an ally stops being an ally.
Nobody cares if their dollar store trinket was made overseas. And nobody would buy it if it was made in America because that same trinket would cost 5x.
People barely even care about their privacy these days, it seems.
But governments still seem to care about their military independence in the rare event they are at odds with an ally.
As an American with mostly headline-level knowledge of Canadian politics, this Mark Carney seems unusually competent and effective, as far as heads-of-state go.
Swimming downstream is easier than swimming upstream. Admitting basic reality we all talk about—eg that canada is a vassal state of the us—is only difficult until the cash river stops.
Mark is a technocrat. He started his political career after a long, successful stint as an economist and central bank governor. Nobody is perfect but he is about the best leader Canada can hope for to lead it out of the current funk it is in. Pivoting away from a long-term trading partner is not an easy process.
Frankly, the issues that Canada faces now stem from a long history of questionable policies, starting from when Diefenbaker shuttered the Arrow and stripped the talent and parts to be scooped up by Boeing, Lockheed et al all the way to when Mulroney & Reagan signed the FTA dooming Canada's private sector. None of this has been good for Canada's sovereignty and long term independence/success. A non-trivial amount of the SV luminaries that have started companies which showcase American inventiveness have a Canadian passport even though they don't advertise it.
The strained relationship with the US right now is actually providing ample opportunity for Canada to make some strategic long term bets without the "US foreign policy alignment" overhang. I'm optimistic.
Will Ferguson wrote a book named _Bastards and Boneheads_ [0] that told the history of Canada's prime ministers as one or the other. The bastards made history, the boneheads are remembered for their folly.
Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau were bastards, and supremely consequential in Canadian history. Joe Clark and Paul Martin were boneheads.
Which ones Harper and Justin Trudeau are may be too soon to tell, but Carney is clearly a bastard.
Countries always use the threat of buying Swedish war planes as a bargaining chip to get a better deal from the US, or whoever they're really going to buy from. So these news are best believed when everything is signed, sealed, and delivered. This has been going on for at least 20 years with SAAB fighters.
From the article: "Saab is also in the running to sell Canada some of its Gripen fighters. Canada has a deal to buy 88 F-35 jets from Lockheed-Martin, but last year, after the US slapped tariffs on key Canadian imports, Carney asked the military to investigate whether it could cut back the order and buy some planes from another manufacturer."
Ask yourself: Why would a nation spill military secrets like this to the media? They're trying to put pressure on the US. Those Gripen fighters are in all likelihood staying in Sweden after all is said and done.
Now the interesting question to me is why is that a country with a tenth of population can have car, truck and military plane manufacturing yet Canada can’t, even with virtually all resources for inputs, including energy can’t.
Canada has many issues. First and foremost, their entire economy is basically 3 mineral extraction industries stacked on top of each other in a trench coat.
They are also (unfortunate?) to share a border with USA and be party to NAFTA. This makes it trivial for educated, professional Canadians to work in the US on a TN visa indefinitely. We know that the doctor and nurse brain-drain from Canada to the US has been ongoing for decades. But it's actually every industry since US firms pay 2-3x more than equivalent Canadian firms.
The reality is that Canadians get very good, tax-payer subsidized educations and then immediately go to the US to work for 10+ years and only return later when they need to start drawing on the Canadian social services for things like healthcare and family care. And Canada itself got none of the benefits of that workforce in between.
I saw a figure recently that the US issued an all-time-high 800,000 TN admissions to Canadians in 2016. And then in 2023 it surged to nearly 1.3 million.
>We know that the doctor and nurse brain-drain from Canada to the US has been ongoing for decades.
Its actually the opposite: it had been going on for some time, but has reversed for decades, and in recent years Canada has had _increasing gains_ of medical professionals from the US.
>The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) reports annually on the number of physicians moving abroad and returning to active practice in Canada (CIHI 1996–2005). In the early to mid-1990s, net losses averaged 400 per year. More recently, the number of physicians leaving Canada has decreased significantly, resulting in net gains of between 30 to 60 per year.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2645159/#:~:text=Th...
> The reality is that Canadians get very good, tax-payer subsidized educations and then immediately go to the US to work for 10+ years and only return later when they need to start drawing on the Canadian social services for things like healthcare and family care.
You write this declaratively as if it describes a typical or representative case. In the 11 years I’ve lived in Canada, this isn’t representative of what I see.
The direction of migration of medical doctors likewise shows signs of reversal. I’m a physician and my wife is a surgeon. We left the U.S. over a decade ago and are constantly receiving inquiries from US physicians about immigration.
> I saw a figure recently that the US issued an all-time-high 800,000 TN visas to Canadians in 2016. And then in 2023 it surged to nearly 1.3 million.
This citation is an order of magnitude off. The US doesn't really track/release visa numbers well, what you're citing might be the number of individual entries using a TN visa - visaholders go back and forth, it's not the total number of visa holders.
Canada has 22m workers, so 130k working in the States is nothing like what you're claiming.
>their entire economy
Resource extraction is about ~10% of GDP, compared to 3-5% in the US and 1-2% in mainland Europe. Scandanvian countries have comparable resource extraction % of GDP. It's hardly the entire economy. It's also diversified resource extraction, it's not dependent on oil, etc. Your claim is overblown.
These are extremely expensive programs that the Swedes have historically been willing to pay to maintain as much neutrality as possible in their defence procurement system. A Saab Gripen has almost the same flyway cost as an F-35 because of manufacturing scale differences (maintenance is far cheaper, though) and the Gripen is far less capable (it is one of the best western fighters if a full blown war happens and your bases are all destroyed, though). Sweden had unique defence requirements due to this that wasn't being met by others.
Sweden was forced to take their defence seriously due to their geography and political will. Canada has had an easy ride and when the going got expensive, we cancelled our domestic programs (most famously the arrow, but also a lot of other stuff).
There were plenty of good reasons to cancel the Arrow: it was very difficult to fly, it burned fuel like crazy, it had poor maneuverability, etc. A friend of mine is considered an expert on its history and is convinced it was the right call, despite going into his research as a huge fan of the plane.
Canada has historically relied on a relatively stable trading relationship with the U.S. That relationship is a shambles. It remains to be seen how Canada retools itself; I imagine that we will see a blend of on-shoring and new trading sources. So it’s less of an issue of “can’t” and more “hasn’t (yet)”.
Frankly to me the fact Canada is "retooling itself" knowing well that this nightmare should be over in less than 3 years, and most likely next President will be a Democrat, but yet they keep retooling, means their strong (reliable?) assumption is that Trump Administration won't leave the office at all, similar to how Putin stayed in power in what arguingly is a Democratic Country.
A lot of people are still in denial about Jan 6th. They really tried to overthrow the election like actually in physical effect. Not hypothetically. They were trying to not certify the election and it came down to a hairs width. They're going to try to again.
This is Trump's second term and MAGA views won't disappear 3 years from now. Even if they assume that there will be a peaceful and lawful transition of power, I can see why they may be planning on the assumption that the "instability" (from their point of view) will continue into the future.
I disagree. You literally have one single human being in charge of 3 main branches of government, and multiple smaller agencies. Noone will manage US like Trump does.
There's a "people won't get tired of our good cop/bad cop bullshit because there's money to be made" attitude in the US that doesn't even reflect our own point of view.
They're retooling because it doesn't matter who the next president is.
It's not just trump anymore. The entire cabinet is project 2025 people, most GOP has turned or was replaced with MAGA. Project 2025 wasn't just about RAGE, it was a sycophant hiring system as people could send in their resumes and get into unelected positions.
The only chance is if the cult spell breaks with trump, as cults rarely survive that. But it at some point it will be too late, their takeover and ability to fuck with elections means you can't vote them out anymore.
You're missing some of the history here. Canada's initial free trade integration with the US in the late 80s was controversial at the time, with opponents specifically predicting a slow erosion of sovereignty until one day Canada is forced to subordinate itself to the US. What Trump showed is that that concern was correct, although the erosion was fortunately not yet complete enough to force Canada's hand. The Canadian people don't want to be continually dependent on the goodwill of future US Presidents; they want "Canada should the US" to sound like "Taiwan should join the US" or "France should join the US", an obviously impossible idea that even the most vehement partisans would have to explain away rather than trying to make it happen.
Sweden does not have a car industry. The fighter jets are a different matter, very strong technical moat and need to prove the system in combat. You can't just start a fighter jet business.
What do you mean Sweden does not have a car industry?
Volvo and Polestar have their HQ in Sweden and huge manufacturing plants. They also develop platforms for some other Gealy brands including Link&co and IIRC also Zeeker.
Volvo is complicated. Basically a lot of these smaller companies and countries realized there was no way they could make the economics work with the cost of electronics and software-related R&D being what they are. So they sold to larger players. But design and final assembly still happens in Gothenburg for high-end models that are typically destined for the EU market. The US now manufactures the SUVs.
Volvo was bought by Ford in 1999 and then sold by Ford to Geely in 2010. It had nothing to do with software related r&d, it was mostly down to Ford needing money after the financial crisis.
Volvo have factories in Sweden, Belgium, USA, and China. The new EX60 is manufactured in Sweden. The US factory makes the EX90, XC60, Polestar 3, and until recently the S60 sedan.
Volvo Cars is still headquartered in Sweden, and employ 22.4k people in Sweden out of 40k globally[1].
Given that the market for Volvo is global, it seems to me that Volvo Cars is still overwhelmingly Swedish, while at the same time being overwhelmingly controlled by Geely.
The Top Gear enthusiast in me loves that you included Koenigsegg in this conversation.
But including a company that hand-builds a handful of hypercars annually in a conversation about the auto industry in Sweden is not the flex you think it is.
Sweden had a native car industry they decommissioned themselves, in short, they basically gave up, but they’re not alone Australia, New Zealand did the same and so did Canada, but they’re starting to realize that they were a little bit hasty in giving up….
Then last, but not least the UK basically threw the towel in too on a wide assortment of industries, but they’re now discovering that that was a big mistake.
We have a larger partner speaking the same language and with a largely synonymous culture and a heavily integrated economy as our neighbour. The moment a Canadian company sees success -- in optics, autos, science, medicine, weaponry, etc. -- it is absorbed by a larger US company and suddenly is no longer Canadian, and in many cases any Canadian operations will usually get choked out.
There are few examples where this isn't the outcome.
This has happened across Canada for well over a century, across every sphere. And in the process the Canadian input is retconned out of existence and Americans ponder why Canada "doesn't make anything". They post ignorant nonsense about how Canada is resource extraction in a trench coat or similar nonsense.
Sweden had nothing like this, and they punch way above their weight class because of this. Though that has been changing, for instance with a Chinese company buying Volvo, etc.
The only protection against this is...protectionism, whether explicit controls or implicitly by ownership or funding structures. Canada became a leader in nuclear tech by the nuclear industry basically being government owned. It became a transportation powerhouse by a government owned railway. And so on.
Change is afoot. Carney has made significant efforts to stop just sending hundreds of billions to the US and most military procurement will focus on Canadian products and innovation. Which leads to lots of gnashing and screaming by propaganda rags like the US-owned PostMedia (yup, even a lot of our media gets absorbed by the US, at least where it isn't explicitly barred from doing so).
Not entirely true. AstraZeneca and ABB are examples that remain partly Swedish but many companies were merged into big multinationals and eventually marginalised.
Saab makes excellent AWACS systems, this strikes me as a good choice. It'll be interesting to see if Canada also invests in the Gripen long-term, as a replacement for the aging CF-18 fleet.
The F-35 always seemed like a funny choice for a mainline fighter for Canada. Even the US has invested in many more F-15EXs. Having a Hi/Lo mix makes sense for a larger force, but equipping a smaller force with only exquisite birds doesn't seem to make much sense.
Then again, this is Canada - sensible decision making in military procurement just isn't something that happens here.
But the economies of scale are such that at least the $$ isn't completely out of whack (for purchase at least, maintenance I'm not so sure of). I would wager that the cost of maintaining those ancient CF-18s is pretty high now too though.
The F-15EX is designed to be a stand-off missile truck that works in tandem with a network of forward-deployed stealth jets. This compensates for the relatively low ordnance load-out of stealth jets. A stealth jet can designate and cue a target from the front using an F-15EX as a missile launcher safely in the back since it is non-stealthy.
The F-15EX isn't a particularly survivable aircraft on its own. It is a plane you'd only use if you have stealth jets and you plan to do air combat at scale. It augments the capabilities of something like an F-35 but isn't something you'd add to your fleet unless you had a lot of stealth aircraft.
The F-15A/C is designed to act as a missile truck, but the F-15EX was specifically designed to be a multirole strike fighter. You can operate it without putting 20 AMRAAMs on the pylon, or without an F-35 datalinked to it, and many countries do. The flexibility and heavy ordinance are the selling point at home and abroad.
Canada could very well operate the F-15EX without a fleet of stealth fighters. The F-35 is not an interceptor platform in any sense of the word, in an "all out" scenario like you're suggesting it's doubtful they would be any better than the CF-18 they have today.
I think the F-16 would have been a good bird for Canada's needs. The F-18 had the advantage of two engines, which strikes me as a good thing in the Arctic. If these two are off the table, things like the Saab are reasonable. There's only 2-3 countries one needs stealth fighters for, and 30-40-ish won't matter in such cases.
We've long pushed for 2 engines - which has made sense in the past. Even a successful ejection over the vast arctic would basically be a death sentence. Though some of our allies don't seem to have the same reservations, and it seems modern engines are a lot more reliable - certainly the F-35 only has one, so it looks like we're ok with it now.
The modern F-18's and the new F-15's would have also made sense, but agreed that modern F-16s would seem to be a nearly perfect fit if a single engine is now deemed acceptable. Given we like to keep equipment for as long as physically possible (and then some), the F-35 might have more runway (rimshot) in that regard though.
If the F-15 line is still in production, it's a damn fine bird and has broad mission capability. And the remaining B-52's are probably older that most of the HN community. At least those not retired or cashed out.
The F-16 lacks the range to operate effectively in Canada. They would need to load it up with multiple conformal or external fuel tanks, which wrecks performance, and would still need extensive tanker support.
The US wedgetail order was canceled and Canada can't afford to fund the program on its own. But slop journalists will spin a geopolitical angle because it gets clicks.
So, how this propaganda works is by presenting a false picture of reality by selective reporting.
Any time someone doesn't choose the US or moves away from the US, etc., or any time events can be remotely interpreted in that way, those stories will get submitted to and raised up to the front page of HN.
Any time someone DOES choose the US, or moves to the US, you will never, ever, ever, see a story about it on HN. They won't get submitted, and if they do, they won't get upvoted.
You only get shown the negative news that helps their agenda, and you never get shown the positive news that would hinder the picture of reality they're trying to place in your mind.
I can only tell you, as someone living in Europe, that there is a strong sentiment against the US at the moment. And this is new, at least in this magnitude. The US is not seen as a reliable partner anymore, but as a bully that sometimes cannot get avoided.
The essence of the this story is still true: many non-Americans are choosing non-US tech/products/services whenever they're faced with an alternative. Living in Sweden I see it around me all the time, and this is something no one even thought about two years ago.
It sounds like you've shifted from hardware purchases to immigration there. The US is indeed still a very popular place to emigrate to, though mostly from poor countries, and it's working very hard to limit immigrants from those countries.
You could take illegal immigration as a sign that the US is a very desirable place to be. But Americans don't seem proud of that, and consider it an economic downside.
But TFA is about military hardware, and more generally about dependence on the United States. Are there any good-news stories there, with economic upsides? I think there were some about the UK, but I'm hard pressed to think of more. At most, the stories I hear are about continuing existing relationships, not forming new ones, and seem to be more about not wanting to go through the cost of changing than about feeling positively towards the US.
There are 1,000 of those everyday. They get caught by the spam filter because it would pollute the front page. The ones that don't choose USA are somewhat interesting, so they get through.
My only source of grief as a Canadian is the dismal state[1] of my country and the bleak prognosis for the future[2]. The whole "elbows up" thing is a convenient sideshow to take attention away from our domestic problems.
While I completely agree with you on [1] and it's tiring to have to re-litigate this issue every few years, [2] was from 2021 and doesn't reflect Canada's current policies.
Canada's current policies seem like a continuation of their previous policies. The only major change is the weakening of links to the US, which is likely to make the economy worse, not better. Even bill C-22 is a zombie bill from the Trudea era (C-63). Tech investment is still flat (nearing zero)[1], taxes are up, and 20% of the workforce have government jobs[2]. This country is cooked.
Or. Have you considered that the erstwhile closest military ally of the US increasingly diversifying AWAY from US programs actually is pretty noteworthy.
You have had canadians boycotting US products, cancel trips to the US, their PM encouraging elbows up attitude and delivering a pretty noteworthy speech in Davos about charting a course for middle powers and you think it’s business as usual?
I can understand why this change happened. Even if American equipment is superior, there is a lot of value to not depending on a supposed 'ally' which
* Arbitrarily slapped high tariffs on all goods from Canada while exempting Russia and Belarus.
* Threatened to take over the country by force.
* Officially suspended the Permanent Joint Board on Defense between US and Canada because of criticism of US foreign policy by the Canadian PM
From a very practical PoV, the only military threat to Canada is from the U.S.
Even if the U.S. and Canada are enemies, if Canada is being attacked by a country that is not the U.S., then the U.S. will come to its defense because they don’t want another nation with the capability to attack Canada to have a North American presence.
So given that the U.S. is the only possible military threat to the U.S., and now that the U.S. has openly threatened Canada, it’s incredibly silly to buy weaponry from the only country that could militarily attack you and almost certainly won’t share repair material, parts, software source etc. and possibly has a kill switch.
> while exempting Russia and Belarus
I thought they were sanctioned to hell and back. Do tariffs even apply as a concept?
> "Even if American equipment is superior ..."
To address the article's context, is the E-3 Sentry superior to the Erieye/GlobalEye?
The E-3 is a dinosaur.
The E-7 Wedgetail is a vastly more capable platform than the Erieye/GlobalEye in pretty much every way, but costs four times as much, and there are other issues with Canada and Boeing as have been pointed out by another commenter.
Delivery schedules are also likely a factor. Assuming the USAF actually orders the E-7, they'll probably get first priority on the Boeing production line. Any export orders would have to wait.
>The E-7 Wedgetail is a vastly more capable platform than the Erieye/GlobalEye in pretty much every way
The airframe itself, perhaps. As for the radar, that remains to be seen. The E-7 uses an L-band AESA radar, whereas the GlobalEye's radar operates in the higher-frequency S-band. In general, higher frequencies are better for engaging smaller/faster targets, but perform worse in adverse weather conditions.
It's been a long time since I took my electronic warfare courses, but in a situation where the radar is expected to spot small drones and other targets I would prefer a higher frequency radar.
It should be noted that the US military itself didn't want the Wedgetail in favor of a space-based solution, until Hegseth forced them for publicity reasons.
Was it just a publicity issue? There was a real risk of a capability gap in that all of the old E-3 airframes would have to be retired long before a space based solution could possibility come online. Plus in an era of anti-satellite weapons proliferation, a crewed aircraft might actually turn out to be more survivable.
Hypocritically, Kegsbreath himself is on record saying the concern was about E-7 survivability: https://www.flightglobal.com/fixed-wing/2025/06/us-defence-s...
The comparable aircraft is the more modern E-7 Wedgetail, which has many features that are superior for Canada's use case (notably including range and NORAD integration). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-7_Wedgetail
Canada has unfortunately been in conflict with Boeing since before either of Trump's terms, originally triggered by Boeing's trade complaints regarding Bombardier's government subsidies.
> Even if American equipment is superior
I'd mention that whether a piece of tech can beat another one on one is a consideration but a larger concern is how maintainable your fleet is. Canada is specifically moving to grow ties with the EU (and has joined their defense industry network) which really incentivizes having a fleet that is a similar makeup to other European countries.
The tariffs and international unpredictability of the US is one motivator - but growing closer to EU markets is also a specific focus of the Carney government. The current Trump administration isn't even the only rationale for this - in 2017 the US imposed extremely heavy tariffs on Bombardier that bankrupted the majority of the corporation.
They also make the underlying bird, so parts aside from the electronics are native.
It's kind of insane they trusted us to begin with. Why?
Americans were our brothers. We had been partners for over a hundred years.
I like this analogy - sparring with each other like toddlers do, before realizing that they have a lot in common as they age, like the English language, industrialization, the systemic abuse of natives, Big Oil, the World Wars and racism.
Now that they're older, they're sparring once again, just like siblings do over the parents' estate.
This is terrible analogy. We're more like neighbours, and US is a bully. We made a decision not to have much a fence before we were friendly neighbours. We regret that decision, and are planting a hedge and reaching out to our other "neighbours" for support.
The whole neighbourhood thinks you're assholes and bullies, we're all scared. But that is bring us closer together as result, so there's some upside.
Racism? Oh man, visit any other country that is more homogenous.... lol. Everything is relative.
Siblings can also be bullies.
Canadian and American racism is documented in specific events, unlike in other countries. I'd be hard pressed to find specific racism-driven events in Poland or Czechia, even though they top the racist charts.
I'm not American so your second point is completely moot.
Sir, Nawrocki is only the president because of racist pressures. I don't even hate him but you cannot argue that he would be elected if it weren't for fear of foreigners.
Because Trump is a new, and (hopefully!) a one time phenomenon.
He is unique in that he seems to have absolute control over the Republican base which makes all internal party checks fail. The rest is provided by a hyper polarized media landscape and a conservative supreme court majority that seems to be open to radical upheavals. The combination of all three has rendered the constitutional safe guards ineffective. In other words, we seem to have run into an edge case in the US constitution.
The supreme court won't change materially in the near future and likely the polarization will continue, but it's hard to image someone in the future with such an absolute grip on either party. So, hopefully a soft restart of the system in 2028 will be the last of this edge case for a while. That's the hope, anyway!
The two countries have far more in common shared interests than differences, so odds are things will drift back to normal in the future.
Trump did not rise to power in isolation. He has not remained in isolation while in power. Voter support for Trump is still reasonably strong, and Trump and his supporters have ensured that the mechanisms of Government are packed with loyalists.
America chose this. America continues to tolerate this. America enabled this.
This isn't something that Trump can be scapegoated for. This is what many Americans wanted, or at the very least, it is what many Americans are willing to tolerate.
We have lots of issues with Canadian protectionism, around $46 billion of them.
We also take issue with them cozying up to the ChiComms.
The trade deficit with Canada is because Americans are buying Canadian products.
Enough Canadians (seriously, the vast majority) live close enough to the border that they could make a weekly trip to the USA and purchase American dairy and other American goods. In fact, prior to the tariffs many Canadians did make regular shopping trips across the border.
So let's be clear: we were buying your products to the extent we wanted to, already.
Erm, Apple gear, cheap stuff, and much of the generic drug market comes from those ChiComs. Or is it ok if the US does it?
As someone unfamiliar with the US-Canada trade relationship, it would be helpful if you developed this argument instead of stating it as a fact. I'm not well-placed to know whether your belief that Canada has bilked the US out of 46 billion dollars is well-founded or not.
> We also take issue with them cozying up to the ChiComms.
does everything possible to spite the Canadian economy. then has the gall to be surprised that Canada would cozy up to people who don't shit on them
who would have guessed?
Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Trump - not a one time phenomenon, more of a natural progression.
> Because Trump is a new, and (hopefully!) a one time phenomenon.
unless the US extinguishes all of its billionaires and somehow convinces 1/3 to 1/2 of their population to not vote against their own interests it'll happen again
> Because Trump is a new, and (hopefully!) a one time phenomenon.
How have you forgotten bush so quickly? Why would bipartisan support of this invasion of Iraq ameliorate an obvious crime against humanity?
Europe clearly has its own bigotries to deal with before it is trustworthy. And islamophobia is only the start
> He is unique in that he seems to have absolute control over the Republican base which makes all internal party checks fail. The rest is provided by a hyper polarized media landscape and a conservative supreme court majority that seems to be open to radical upheavals. The combination of all three has rendered the constitutional safe guards ineffective. In other words, we seem to have run into an edge case in the US constitution.
The US constitution has absolutely nothing at all to say about political parties or the particular state of the media landscape, or for that matter the partisan alignment of justices of the supreme court. It's incoherent to suggest that there are "constitutional safe guards" that should have prevented the election of a president (or the exercise of power by that president), who is supported by about one-half of a very polarized electorate and opposed by a separate one-half. Everything about the Trump presidency is as constitutional as every previous US presidency, including the phenomenon of opponents of the president trying to claim that specific things they do are or should be unconstitutional.
Why trust anyone? Really what stops a Trump from getting elected anywhere else? The citizens seem smarter or less bigoted? Are you sure that will always be the case given the agitprop in every form of media and internet communication in every language on earth?
There have been many elections in many political entities where a politician got elected because one group of citizens really liked that politician; and another group of citizens thought that politician was extremely, historically bad. This is inherent to mass democracy itself in any polity where there are real and deep-seated differences between different groups of the electorate. "A Trump" - in the sense of a politician whose opponents describe in apocalyptic terms and consider that politician's supporters to be stupid and bigoted - gets elected all the time in all sorts of places.
> Why trust anyone?
Because comparative advantage.
True. But we seem like the least trustworthy people on earth at the moment. After israel, anyway.
Trump has nothing to do with it.
> Trump has nothing to do with it.
Genuinely, what makes the US untrustworthy if not Trump? I’m curious what I may be missing.
> Genuinely, what makes the US untrustworthy if not Trump?
We invaded Korea, and then Vietnam, and a few hundred other interventions that don't seem to be sanctioned by the international community. All because of a hardon for ideology that doesn't seem to actually reflect the interests of the people who live here.
> We invaded Korea
what a terrible bad faith arguemnt
N Korea invaded the south and the UN voted to create a joint force in there to defend it.
Most of those were sanctioned by the international community. Look at the participants.
We had the international community on a leash after WWII. This means nothing.
Leash or not, there was international support as a fact.
Great. I'm happy you're willing to recognize our fucking empire for what it is
Israel seems trustworthy in the sense that their priorities and aims are abundantly clear to everyone. People are pissed about Israel for Iran right now, but, I mean, there is a reason why they are attacking Iran right now and not Egypt or Turkey. You go about and poke the bear like Iran has done for decades with Israel, you get these outcomes. Egypt tried to poke the bear but that was decades ago and they've since learned there is nothing to gain there.
Nobody is buying this narrative of Israel being provoked, because the reaction to the provocation, if there ever was one, is completely disproportional.
Israel had settlements in Palestine way before the conflict outbreak, and nothing explains the systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure on Lebanon but for Israel just going supernova, like Germany and Japan back then.
Hey that's up to you. I will never vote for a person who supports Israel. Our parents may have been retarded but we don't have to be. I just see a state devoted to slaughtering as many people as they can. Iran looks like a saint compared to them.
I'm not supportive of them either. I just don't consider them untrustworthy though. Everything they do is exactly what they've always done since that state was formed. Easily the most predictable nation on earth, Israel. Easy way to get Israel off your back though? Stop funding terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah that inevitably do something stupid to provoke the Israelis into armed conflict. It is really that simple.
True. Israel begins, Israel assassinates and complains about being targeted by terrorism. Israel begins the loop again. What is more reliable than Israel?
Iran would be a better ally. China would be a better ally. Fucking Russia would be a better ally. Why did we decide to die on the hills of (loosely translated, I guess) mageddo?
But instead our state leans into exterminating people because our PR team was inspired by Goebbels and was trained to hate muslims
It is like a modern day state of Prussia. A beachhead and airstrip in the middle east. Weapons manufacturing. Rocket science. A cyber security firm. An intelligence agency. Some of the best in the world at these things. All wrapped up into one. This is why nations like to ally with Israel.
But again, if you don't want problems with Israel don't make problems with Israel. Their populace is militarized like few other and seemingly with a lot of political cohesion. Egypt has learned not to poke the bear. So has Jordan.
You missed the absolutely huge one: that the plane it's based around is a Bombardier aircraft manufactured here in Canada.
And in general this is how Saab has tried to court us -- by making promises (how real is unclear) to bring manufacturing jobs to Canada to build things.
That is something the US has not done, will not do, and most importantly cannot do under Trump/Bissent/etc.
Canada is very unlikely to be invaded, so the actual military effectiveness / superiority is only one factor. Reducing unemployment and enhancing our manufacturing sector is as or more important.
> Canada is very unlikely to be invaded
Except from the south.
Or, as it turns out, from within. (Looking at you, Danielle Smith).
But yes you're right. The only times we've been invaded were from that direction.
> Or, as it turns out, from within. (Looking at you, Danielle Smith).
Pretty sure that's a prong of the southern strategy.
Danielle Smith is plainly a US agit-prop effort. Probably in concert with the Russians, since funding separatists is their MO
> But yes you're right. The only times we've been invaded were from that direction.
Looked it up:
4 Times the U.S. Invaded Canada
https://www.mentalfloss.com/history/war/4-times-us-invaded-c...
They really had to stretch for #4.
> * Arbitrarily slapped high tariffs on all goods from Canada while exempting Russia and Belarus.
This is due to sanctions. There is no trade between Russia and the USA to put tariffs on.
Makes me wonder what the penguins of Heard and McDonald Islands would say about this
We call this confirmation bias.
The Saab is likely cheaper to operate as it's a smaller plane and Canada only has to patrol its northern border.
"We call this confirmation bias".
I'm genuinely curious to know what you think the author's pre-existing beliefs are.
You seem to have a few of your own: "Canada only has to patrol its northern border"
> You seem to have a few of your own: "Canada only has to patrol its northern border"
the Canadians do not aggressively patrol the southern border because that is where all of the people are -- unlike the north -- and because the reality is that the entire Canadian military is basically a speedbump for if/when the US invaded in earnest.
> You seem to have a few of your own: "Canada only has to patrol its northern border"
Another belief I hold is that you didn't care to click the link or read past the title because it literally states "aircraft to patrol Arctic territory" in bold font in the sub-heading.
You're being deliberately obtuse with nothing constructive to add to this discussion.
Open a history book. They do a lot more than patrol the northern border. Canada was involved in WWI, WWII, Korea, Iraq 1 and 2, Fall of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libyan civil war, Iraq civil war, Syrian civil war and ISIS conflict, Yemeni civil war, and a smattering of other conflicts over the past century.
Canada, as a commonwealth country, was involved in ww I and ww ii years before the us decided to get involved. Or more involved than selling arms.
> Canada only has to patrol its northern border.
At what point on this current trajectory in the US would that change... mostly facetiously, but not entirely..
Canada would only have to patrol its southern Alberta border /s
No coincidence that Albertans are sparking up the seceding issue again. When 10% of the population produces nearly 20% of the country's GDP it's a breeding ground for contempt. And it also seems like Albertans are the butt of a lot of jokes from the other Canadians anyway.
I'm sure this US government would love to see an "independent" Alberta.
You're rounding both ways to exaggerate your point. 2024 numbers, Stats Canada (via Wikipedia) has Alberta at 11.9% population, and 15.25% GDP.
They (and Sask too) do swing on the higher end in GDP per capita, but it's not a 2:1 by any stretch.
> […] 15.25% GDP.
Which isn't that far off from BC's 13.80%:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canadian_provinces_and...
And this is mostly thanks to the oil sands. Will that always be the economic engine it is today?
So then by your arguments above, you're good with California leaving since they'd be a G6 nation on their own?
Because as you would might say: I'm sure this Canadian government would love to see an "independent" California.
Texas has entertained the idea of seceding for 150 years. And they would be a G7 country if they did. But they would have to fight a war to do it. USA already went through this once.
The only thing really stopping Alberta from leaving is whether or not BC, Ontario, and Quebec are willing to fight a war to stop it.
And that gets a lot more complicated if the US also wants Alberta to go independent....
Texas would be a G7 nation for about a week if they seceded from the US. Being the logistics hub for a country only works if you’re part of that country.
The instant Alberta secedes from Canada, the Indigenous would secede all unceded Treaty land from the independent Alberta. Which includes all of the tar sands, the source of Alberta's wealth.
Canada might not be willing to fight, but the Indigenous probably are.
> but the Indigenous probably are
None of this matters in this context. The indiginous people literally do not matter. It's bad, but it's just how it is when white Europeans start fighting over land in North America. We have 3 centuries of evidence.
We already have a clause in our constitution to allow for orderly withdrawal from Canada. We'd have to resolve the first Nations angle which would probably be more of a hurdle.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say if Canada wasn't willing to let Quebec leave, and they've tried with significantly more effort than Alberta ever has, then they're not going to let Alberta go.
>The only thing really stopping Alberta from leaving is whether or not BC, Ontario, and Quebec are willing to fight a war to stop it.
Unlike the individual US states, Alberta never joined Canada. It was not an entity that existed prior to Canada's confederation. Alberta was basically pencil-whipped into existence by carving out a chunk of an already existing territory (the Northwest Territory).
Despite American and Russian destabilization campaigns in Canada, there is no legal mechanism by which Canadian provinces can unilaterally secede.
>And that gets a lot more complicated if the US also wants Alberta to go independent....
Recent past polling overwhelmingly showed Albertans in favor of remaining in Canada. This latest frenzy is widely known to be a foreign influence operation.
The implication that this somehow weakens Alberta’s constitutional status is false. Alberta is a full province under the Constitution of Canada with the same constitutional standing as the other provinces.
The Supreme Court has already ruled that Canada and other provinces would be obligated to negotiate terms of separation should a province ever vote to leave in a clear referendum.
Yes, support for leaving is probably at 10-20%. Just having the referendum will build the infrastructure and political machinery for keeping it alive for a long time from the first try. I live here and I'm not a fan of Smith for encouraging it at all.
>The implication that this somehow weakens Alberta’s constitutional status is false.
I implied no such thing. In fact I was careful to use the term "unilaterally" when referring to secession. My understanding is doing it properly would require a full constitutional amendment.
> there is no legal mechanism by which Canadian provinces can unilaterally secede
Legal? Who's laws? Albertans can just declare that they don't respect Ottawa's authority, right?
Guns and bullets are the only "legal" currency. It's not paperwork.
If Canada cuts off the money tap, that health and security bill is going to be significant.
>Albertans can just declare that they don't respect Ottawa's authority, right?
Sure, but just like nobody gives a shit about what Sovereign Citizens do or do not respect, such a declaration would only carry weight if there are enough people that want to mount an armed rebellion. And despite what American influence operations would have you believe, there simply aren't. Most Albertans want to remain in Canada.
This is false. Alberta is NOT the economic engine of Canada, that’s a huge misconception of a group of Canadians (mostly Albertans) [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/5lSJpqA8RU4?si=fxwKpUFFKO7gK63E
Did you watch this video? About half way through he confirms that Alberta has the highest GDP/capita in Canada and is the largest (per capita) tax contributor. Ontario is obviously larger in absolute terms, but it has at least 4x the population.
> About half way through he confirms that Alberta has the highest GDP/capita in Canada and is the largest (per capita) tax contributor.
Nunavut and NWT have higher per capita numbers, but that's territory versus province:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canadian_provinces_and...
Yukon and SK are in the >90k range, both ~5k below AB.
As with any time you deploy an average... (And I'd expect better on this forum of all places)
Show me the distribution. Show me the median not just the mean. Show me the standard deviation.
Otherwise ... abused.
Yes, we all know oil is an extremely profitable (and environmentally destructive) commodity. That doesn't make the typical Albertans somehow responsible for holding up all of confederation. Just means oil is making some people very rich. For now.
I'm from there and my family is in Alberta. I can tell you now that the oil industry ain't doing jack squat for them.
Do the oil profits even stay in Canada? Taxes maybe, but it’s not like the province owns the wells.
They get to "own" them when it's time to "clean them up" after they're abandoned by bankrupt shell corporations, that's for sure.
https://www.pgic-iogc.gc.ca/eng/1588343274882/1588355750048
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/abaondoned-oil-well-o...
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/what-did-alberta-do-with...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-more-than-1...
But Trudeau had it out for Alberta. Better off separating. Yep.
You're right but you should cite something other than the CBC, since it will just be immediately dismissed by the biased as biased.
Alberta is very important economically. I'm from there. Ontario (I live there) and Quebec and BC are also massively important. And fanning the flames of disinformation and playing grievance politics to make Albertans feel discriminated against has become an extremely serious problem.
Wab Kinew was very eloquent on this topic yesterday.
I would think Ontario is the centre of Canada as it has the most people and the financial centre. Google's AI says 38% of GDP. And the problem Alberta faces is who wants to separate, what do they want to do afterwards and what ground do they actually own (vs. treaties that predate Alberta).
When Alberta at least catches up to Quebec in practicing being independent (runs its own police, collects its own taxes, has its own pension system, maintains foreign services, ... They might decide the extra taxes to pay for such is less "fun". And they need a border to ship stuff through.
According to Wikipedia, Alberta accounts for 11.52% of the national population and 15.25% of the GDP. Such injustice.
That's not the injustice. The problem is that Alberta's political interests are very poorly (if at all) represented federally. This has come to a head a few times in the past with things like cancelled pipeline projects or the NEP[1]. So the issue is that Alberta has 11.52% of the population, contributes 15.25% of the GDP, yet must constantly fight against policies that put it at a disadvantage or run counter to its political leanings.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Energy_Program
> Estimates have placed Alberta's losses between $50 billion and $100 billion because of the NEP.[32][33] Alberta still initially enjoyed an economic surplus due to high oil prices, but the surplus was heavily reduced by the NEP, which, in turn, stymied many of Lougheed's policies for economic diversification to reduce Alberta's dependence on the cyclical energy industry, such as the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, and also left the province with an infrastructure deficit. In particular, the Alberta Heritage Fund was meant to save as much of the earnings during high oil prices to act as a "rainy day" cushion if oil prices collapsed because of the cyclical nature of the oil and gas industry.
Cancelled pipeline projects? Ottawa doesn't cancel pipeline projects. All the problems with pipeline projects are caused by environmental reviews etc, which fall under legislation brought in by Stephen Harper, an Albertan.
It's much the opposite, Canada just spent $34B to ensure the Trans-Mountain pipeline got built. Alberta is the one that gets the resource revenue, but it's Ottawa that has to pay for your pipelines. That's hardly fair.
Alberta has one legitimate grievance, the NEP. Which is a plan that was cancelled by Mulroney over 40 years ago.
The AHSTF performed poorly because successive Albertan provincial governments slashed contributions to it, not because of the ghost of the NEP. It was established in 1976, then contributions were cut in half in 1983, and eliminated entirely in 1987. The NEP was gone by 1985.
What hurt Alberta was every cyclical crash in oil prices, and their steadfast refusal to implement additional revenue streams like a provincial sales tax while spending instead of saving their resource-boom surpluses.
> And it also seems like Albertans are the butt of a lot of jokes from the other Canadians anyway.
This is hardly my experience as a Canadian. They're not Newfoundlanders, for crying out loud...
I thought Québec-bashing was a national sport.
Of course the US gov would love to see an "independent" Alberta... They'd see that as easy oil reserves to put their hands on and a weaker Canada. They're working with traitors in separatist organizations as well as PP and trying to import MAGA into Canada.. Albertan's, due solely to their location, stand on oil riches... They don't have to do much to be the country's highest earners, its literally handed to them on a sticky black oil platter. (Not saying they don't work hard... loads of people work just as hard in other fields that aren't covered in gold though). They have the highest median pay in Canada, pay the least taxes.. Yet still spend their time crying and saying they're keeping Canada afloat... They're not Canada's highest GDP province... And other provinces don't spend their time trying to sell out to the US, even after the US threatening to destroy Canada, economically or otherwise. That's treason my guy. There's not too many ways to say it. Also, Alberta's population isn't even close to having the votes to even considering separating, without getting into all the other issues they're trying to pretend don't matter. The whole thing is a joke.
What is stopping the Swedes from electing a jackass? They seem smart for now? It happens in Europe too. All these weaknesses are liable for any country in a democratic model where executive is controlled via popular vote. Population is trivial to manipulate. This is the new world. Running to Sweden doesn't change the underlying issue of the ease of manipulating an electorate using technological affordances to capture a nation from the inside without a single shot fired.
It can happen in Sweden too but it is less likely to. We don't have a president, we have a prime minister with limited power. We have a stronger democracy run by coalitions instead of a single party. One jackass is not enough in Sweden.
Nothing, but when your spouse turns into an abusive piece of shit, breaking up with them and looking for a new one is the right call.
Sure, the new one might turn into one too, but that's no reason to stay with one who is definitely one.
Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback. That's the obvious result of Trumpism - when you seek to turn every interaction into a short-term win for you, people simply stop doing business with you whenever they can avoid it.
Tens of millions of Americans voted for this guy three times, overwhelmingly twice - this is how the country wants to act.
If he and his cronies are removed from power and prosecuted and everyone pinkie swears to never go down this road again, maybe we can look into rebuilding some of that trust. In the meantime, you reap what you sow.
Run from the US. Create a new seat of power all you want. Putin will put in his manchurian candidate wherever the power lies. The fact this happened to the US is really a byproduct of its global position. So create a new global leader, and that will be the new target for capture via propagandizing the electorate and electing a sympathizer. Running never solves anything. The problem is still the problem, and is not getting addressed.
Democracy in the US is sick at the best of times. It's a fundamental flaw in strong executive presidential republics, doubled down on by the legislatures ability to constantly redistrict in a way that advantages the incumbents, tripled down on by the lack of a plausible mechanism to have a non-confidence motion.
Canada can't solve this problem inside US politics. Only Americans can, at any one of the three boxes. It can only work to disentangle it's critical dependencies, and to protect its own interests.
And democracy isn't sick in the UK that elected conservatives to leave from the EU? It isn't sick in Hungary that elected Orban? It isn't sick in Germany where 1/4 of the bundestag is comprised of AfD? Far right is rising in Canada too in recent years (1).
1. https://universityaffairs.ca/features/northern-shift/
Citing one bad election or referendum, and another country that just had a complete political upheaval that has blown up in our good friend Orban's face, and a third that's up in the air isn't as strong an argument as you would hope it to be.
Any country can elect chucklefucks or vote for something stupid. Some of them have systems that are more resistant to the long-term damage they cause. Some of them are less. The US is definitely in the 'less' category as all of the checks and balances and systemic inertia completely collapsed.
Also, the other big difference is that when Hungary or the UK sneezes, Canada doesn't catch a cold.
Alright, if you think that the world is someone inoculated against this, I'm not sure what else to say. I just don't believe that at all. Humans are fungible and Americans aren't uniquely stupid.
This is actually more likely a non-political procurement decision that looks like a political one.
This is the 'right size' for Canada and other nations - the US doesn't offer a true comparable, and, looks like the US balked at buying the 'kind of comparable' Boeing E7 putting it in jeopardy.
With European military renaissance and the SAAB gear proving itself in Ukraine ... well, you see the shift.
This is the shift writ large.
This is going to happen across all industries.
I don't think it's going to 'fundamentally' alter the landscape, but it will be a shift we don't come back from.
In the past countries would buy American equipment even if it wasn’t the best fit because that would make you essentially an American ally. Being part of the U.S. ecosystem was valuable.
Unfortunately, over the last 1.5 years, the political value proposition has turned by 180 degrees. - Being a U.S. ally no longer guarantees that you will be protected by the U.S. as Ukraine is seeing. But the U.S. has been tearing agreements left and right and the President has openly said he may not respond to a valid Article 5 invocation.
- Being a U.S. ally seems to bring even more threats from the U.S. as Canada and Europe are seeing
- Being a U.S. ally is no guarantee of protection even if you literally host American bases like the gulf countries are seeing. In fact, it’s only made them a target and the U.S. prioritized protecting Israel entirely over protecting any of the Gulf states.
The value proposition for buying U.S. weapons has become really bad at this point.
Boeing and Airbus have tremendous backlogs...
>As of March 31st, 2026, Airbus reported a commercial aircraft backlog of 9,031 aircraft. Based on the company’s 2026 delivery target of 870 aircraft, this represents approximately 10.4 years of production coverage.
>Boeing’s commercial backlog stood at approximately 6,719 aircraft at the end of March. Using Forecast International’s production estimates, Boeing’s backlog equates to roughly 10.1 years of production coverage.
https://flightplan.forecastinternational.com/2026/04/14/airb...
Those are facts.
They do not mean that the people who ordered them today are wanting them today. If you need them in 10 years time, you need to order them today. It can easily change, if a flight company doesnt want to do business with Boeing or Airbus, they can cancel their pre-orders. Then the pre-order list might shrink really fast.
Indeed. Backlogs can evaporate. Can you imagine anyone taking delivery of a newly built 737 in 10 years? 7 years? Theoretically, that's part of the backlog.
Why not taking delivery of a current plane in 7 years? What do you think the development, testing, certification and production scaling timeline is of a brand new airframe?
> Can you imagine anyone taking delivery of a newly built 737 in 10 years?
..yes? Companies are still placing orders, despite knowing how long the backlog is. I also expect the 737s will still be sold in 20+ years time, much less 7-10.
Do military versions of aircraft use the same production lines, and the same production queue, as commercial aircraft?
In related news:
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/05/21/italy-moves-to...
I guess insulting and threatening your allies isn't great for arms sales.
If people want to grasp the view of US in Europe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8qSZO4jvTI
(You can watch just the first minute to get the gist)
Hadn't seen that before. Bloody marvellous.
It helps that the base plane is built in Canada, and that the PM made commitments to the Swedish king in November 2025.
Worth noting that the base plane for one of the US-based contenders, the Aeris X by L3Harris, would also be the same Bombardier Global 6500 business jet.
That one has the disadvantage of not yet existing, although South Korea has ordered
Or, consider that the smaller Saab better fits the mission profile for Canada, and may be cheaper to operate, all the while The Guardian is furiously beating off trying to turn this into a bigger story than it really is.
Cheaper to operate and mission-fit (debatable) is one thing, but the real question is: "Would this have happened without the US president's antics?"
Unfortunately, there is nothing in the US system (as far as I can see) that prevents Trump-like behaviour being the new standard. There were three supposedly independent, contentious branches of Government. One is inert (legislature), one enabled Trump (SCOTUS) and the third, of course, is Trump. I am unaware of any mechanism that can change things.
Trump-like behavior isn't the inevitable result of the US System though. We could've had another 20 presidents in a row who didn't go and break the norm of maintaining global alliances and not threatening to invade our neighbors and closest allies constantly.
So it's relevant to ask if this would still be happening without Trumps antics, even isolationists like JD Vance wouldn't force our allies hands like this.
Trump would have done nothing if he wasn’t aided and enabled by the rest of the government. There’s no indication this was a one off.
There is also the fourth - the press, which is either actively cheerleading him, or sanewashing every insane thing be does, or walks an eggshells around him.
Obviously not. Canada would gladly have kept paying 2x market prices just to stay in the good graces of the US, with a presumption of 'free' defense in exchange for paying so much.
This era is over. US defense companies now need to compete for real.
Without the second election of Trump? It's likely. Canada's aircraft industry got majorly burned by the US in 2017 during his first administration and Biden didn't significantly reverse the impact in any way.
> Canada's aircraft industry got majorly burned by the US in 2017
Canada's aircraft industry has been on life support since long before Trump took office, having been forced to partner up with China.
The C-Series was divested to Airbus, the Dash 8 isn't produced anymore, and all Bombardier proper produces are biz-jets.
Lol, why do you think the C series was divested to Airbus?
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/trump-administratio...
The US doesn't even use the Wedgetail, and has cancelled and then un-cancelled it:
https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/pentagon-e-7-wedgetail-...
I feel a deep sense of pride and hope, palpably in my chest, when I get a week of news about how we're developing much closer ties with our European allies and divesting ourselves of the abusive American relationship.
Carney's Davos speech was powerful, but those words needed to be followed by actions, which I think we are seeing. I'm used to being so disappointed by politicians.
Over the last few months we've seen announcements of shifts from US-based supply chains to non-US-supply chains. As an American, I think this is prudent, based on what has happened in the last year and change. The US is no longer a reliable partner and this is what you do when that happens.
100 years from now, the last 15 months will be written about in no uncertain terms: this administration has loaded many footguns and pulled the trigger, over ideologies which are just plain stupid. "America First" indeed. Soft power is power. "Forever" wars are wars we shouldn't be in. Retribution by POTUS acting like a 5 year old is disgusting no matter what party that person came from.
It will take decades to recover from what has and will happen during this administration's run. Let's hope the power they have ends in November 2026 and not Nov 2028.
> no longer a reliable partner
That's putting it mildly. Threatening to invade allies justifies stronger words.
Look around you. What products do you own with a US supply chain and what has a Chinese supply chain.
How exactly is that related to their point about nations moving to alternative supply chains away from US based ones? They're saying the administrations actions are counterproductive, and driving away both money and influence from their allies.
And yes, most consumer goods from everywhere come from a Chinese supply chain ... but we're not talking about consumer goods here. We're talking in this case about military purchases. There aren't many western countries buying military hardware from China.
Do you have a point?
Saying that products with US based supply chains are rare does not somehow detract from the point of moving away from the ones that still exist.
And they do exist, just not for consumers, or at least not at a price most people are willing to pay.
The point is that focusing on a rare us supply chain obscures the bigger picture.
It sounds like you're obscuring the point by muddying the water here.
Guess the people writing on HN here don't have Mac's, iPhones or iPads or use whatever the watches are called.
Supply chains are not just components, but things like military planes. See referenced article.
The supply chain of relevance is the critical software, infrastructure to run it, and ability to remotely kill it if an ally stops being an ally.
Nobody cares if their dollar store trinket was made overseas. And nobody would buy it if it was made in America because that same trinket would cost 5x.
People barely even care about their privacy these days, it seems.
But governments still seem to care about their military independence in the rare event they are at odds with an ally.
Bring back the Arrow
Trust matters in business because it provides a sense of predictability
Awesome, the more suppliers, sources and competition the better. Might this bring prices down and quality up?
As an American with mostly headline-level knowledge of Canadian politics, this Mark Carney seems unusually competent and effective, as far as heads-of-state go.
Swimming downstream is easier than swimming upstream. Admitting basic reality we all talk about—eg that canada is a vassal state of the us—is only difficult until the cash river stops.
Mark is a technocrat. He started his political career after a long, successful stint as an economist and central bank governor. Nobody is perfect but he is about the best leader Canada can hope for to lead it out of the current funk it is in. Pivoting away from a long-term trading partner is not an easy process.
Frankly, the issues that Canada faces now stem from a long history of questionable policies, starting from when Diefenbaker shuttered the Arrow and stripped the talent and parts to be scooped up by Boeing, Lockheed et al all the way to when Mulroney & Reagan signed the FTA dooming Canada's private sector. None of this has been good for Canada's sovereignty and long term independence/success. A non-trivial amount of the SV luminaries that have started companies which showcase American inventiveness have a Canadian passport even though they don't advertise it.
The strained relationship with the US right now is actually providing ample opportunity for Canada to make some strategic long term bets without the "US foreign policy alignment" overhang. I'm optimistic.
He was the Governor of both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada.
Will Ferguson wrote a book named _Bastards and Boneheads_ [0] that told the history of Canada's prime ministers as one or the other. The bastards made history, the boneheads are remembered for their folly.
Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau were bastards, and supremely consequential in Canadian history. Joe Clark and Paul Martin were boneheads.
Which ones Harper and Justin Trudeau are may be too soon to tell, but Carney is clearly a bastard.
[0] https://www.amazon.ca/Bastards-Boneheads-Canadas-Glorious-Le...
Countries always use the threat of buying Swedish war planes as a bargaining chip to get a better deal from the US, or whoever they're really going to buy from. So these news are best believed when everything is signed, sealed, and delivered. This has been going on for at least 20 years with SAAB fighters.
From the article: "Saab is also in the running to sell Canada some of its Gripen fighters. Canada has a deal to buy 88 F-35 jets from Lockheed-Martin, but last year, after the US slapped tariffs on key Canadian imports, Carney asked the military to investigate whether it could cut back the order and buy some planes from another manufacturer."
Ask yourself: Why would a nation spill military secrets like this to the media? They're trying to put pressure on the US. Those Gripen fighters are in all likelihood staying in Sweden after all is said and done.
We can also have a chuckle and imagine the kerfuffle in the US West Coast wanted to be the 11th provinces...
Now the interesting question to me is why is that a country with a tenth of population can have car, truck and military plane manufacturing yet Canada can’t, even with virtually all resources for inputs, including energy can’t.
Canada has many issues. First and foremost, their entire economy is basically 3 mineral extraction industries stacked on top of each other in a trench coat.
They are also (unfortunate?) to share a border with USA and be party to NAFTA. This makes it trivial for educated, professional Canadians to work in the US on a TN visa indefinitely. We know that the doctor and nurse brain-drain from Canada to the US has been ongoing for decades. But it's actually every industry since US firms pay 2-3x more than equivalent Canadian firms.
The reality is that Canadians get very good, tax-payer subsidized educations and then immediately go to the US to work for 10+ years and only return later when they need to start drawing on the Canadian social services for things like healthcare and family care. And Canada itself got none of the benefits of that workforce in between.
I saw a figure recently that the US issued an all-time-high 800,000 TN admissions to Canadians in 2016. And then in 2023 it surged to nearly 1.3 million.
>We know that the doctor and nurse brain-drain from Canada to the US has been ongoing for decades.
Its actually the opposite: it had been going on for some time, but has reversed for decades, and in recent years Canada has had _increasing gains_ of medical professionals from the US.
>The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) reports annually on the number of physicians moving abroad and returning to active practice in Canada (CIHI 1996–2005). In the early to mid-1990s, net losses averaged 400 per year. More recently, the number of physicians leaving Canada has decreased significantly, resulting in net gains of between 30 to 60 per year. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2645159/#:~:text=Th...
> The reality is that Canadians get very good, tax-payer subsidized educations and then immediately go to the US to work for 10+ years and only return later when they need to start drawing on the Canadian social services for things like healthcare and family care.
You write this declaratively as if it describes a typical or representative case. In the 11 years I’ve lived in Canada, this isn’t representative of what I see.
The direction of migration of medical doctors likewise shows signs of reversal. I’m a physician and my wife is a surgeon. We left the U.S. over a decade ago and are constantly receiving inquiries from US physicians about immigration.
> We left the U.S. over a decade ago
I'm assuming you were educated in Canada, and then you worked in the US (but now you don't)?
> I saw a figure recently that the US issued an all-time-high 800,000 TN visas to Canadians in 2016. And then in 2023 it surged to nearly 1.3 million.
This citation is an order of magnitude off. The US doesn't really track/release visa numbers well, what you're citing might be the number of individual entries using a TN visa - visaholders go back and forth, it's not the total number of visa holders.
DHS estimates 130k Canadian visaholders in country in 2024. https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/nonimmigrant/populat...
Canada has 22m workers, so 130k working in the States is nothing like what you're claiming.
>their entire economy
Resource extraction is about ~10% of GDP, compared to 3-5% in the US and 1-2% in mainland Europe. Scandanvian countries have comparable resource extraction % of GDP. It's hardly the entire economy. It's also diversified resource extraction, it's not dependent on oil, etc. Your claim is overblown.
Canada also supplies the US with most of its comedians.
These are extremely expensive programs that the Swedes have historically been willing to pay to maintain as much neutrality as possible in their defence procurement system. A Saab Gripen has almost the same flyway cost as an F-35 because of manufacturing scale differences (maintenance is far cheaper, though) and the Gripen is far less capable (it is one of the best western fighters if a full blown war happens and your bases are all destroyed, though). Sweden had unique defence requirements due to this that wasn't being met by others.
Sweden was forced to take their defence seriously due to their geography and political will. Canada has had an easy ride and when the going got expensive, we cancelled our domestic programs (most famously the arrow, but also a lot of other stuff).
There were plenty of good reasons to cancel the Arrow: it was very difficult to fly, it burned fuel like crazy, it had poor maneuverability, etc. A friend of mine is considered an expert on its history and is convinced it was the right call, despite going into his research as a huge fan of the plane.
Canada has historically relied on a relatively stable trading relationship with the U.S. That relationship is a shambles. It remains to be seen how Canada retools itself; I imagine that we will see a blend of on-shoring and new trading sources. So it’s less of an issue of “can’t” and more “hasn’t (yet)”.
Frankly to me the fact Canada is "retooling itself" knowing well that this nightmare should be over in less than 3 years, and most likely next President will be a Democrat, but yet they keep retooling, means their strong (reliable?) assumption is that Trump Administration won't leave the office at all, similar to how Putin stayed in power in what arguingly is a Democratic Country.
The nightmare was supposed to be “over in 3 years” 9 years ago.
The foreseeable future is MAGA candidates with a coin flip odds of winning indefinitely.
A lot of people are still in denial about Jan 6th. They really tried to overthrow the election like actually in physical effect. Not hypothetically. They were trying to not certify the election and it came down to a hairs width. They're going to try to again.
This is Trump's second term and MAGA views won't disappear 3 years from now. Even if they assume that there will be a peaceful and lawful transition of power, I can see why they may be planning on the assumption that the "instability" (from their point of view) will continue into the future.
I disagree. You literally have one single human being in charge of 3 main branches of government, and multiple smaller agencies. Noone will manage US like Trump does.
Trump doesn't "manage" anything. Trump is "managed". The question is who all pull the strings.
It's all project 2025 and the heritage foundation running the government.
There's a "people won't get tired of our good cop/bad cop bullshit because there's money to be made" attitude in the US that doesn't even reflect our own point of view.
They're retooling because it doesn't matter who the next president is.
It's not just trump anymore. The entire cabinet is project 2025 people, most GOP has turned or was replaced with MAGA. Project 2025 wasn't just about RAGE, it was a sycophant hiring system as people could send in their resumes and get into unelected positions.
The only chance is if the cult spell breaks with trump, as cults rarely survive that. But it at some point it will be too late, their takeover and ability to fuck with elections means you can't vote them out anymore.
You're missing some of the history here. Canada's initial free trade integration with the US in the late 80s was controversial at the time, with opponents specifically predicting a slow erosion of sovereignty until one day Canada is forced to subordinate itself to the US. What Trump showed is that that concern was correct, although the erosion was fortunately not yet complete enough to force Canada's hand. The Canadian people don't want to be continually dependent on the goodwill of future US Presidents; they want "Canada should the US" to sound like "Taiwan should join the US" or "France should join the US", an obviously impossible idea that even the most vehement partisans would have to explain away rather than trying to make it happen.
As an addendum to this post, this debate between Turner and Mulroney over (what would become) NAFTA captures some of the feeling of the time [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jlvb9czZFXw
[2] https://www.c-span.org/program/international-telecasts/canad...
Not that it invalidate your point, but Sweden has 1/4 the population of Canada, not 1/10.
Sweden does not have a car industry. The fighter jets are a different matter, very strong technical moat and need to prove the system in combat. You can't just start a fighter jet business.
What do you mean Sweden does not have a car industry?
Volvo and Polestar have their HQ in Sweden and huge manufacturing plants. They also develop platforms for some other Gealy brands including Link&co and IIRC also Zeeker.
And then there is the Koenigsegg...
It does with Volvo, although I couldn't say how big it is relative to global industry. Within Europe it's a large player
Volvo is complicated. Basically a lot of these smaller companies and countries realized there was no way they could make the economics work with the cost of electronics and software-related R&D being what they are. So they sold to larger players. But design and final assembly still happens in Gothenburg for high-end models that are typically destined for the EU market. The US now manufactures the SUVs.
Volvo was bought by Ford in 1999 and then sold by Ford to Geely in 2010. It had nothing to do with software related r&d, it was mostly down to Ford needing money after the financial crisis.
Volvo have factories in Sweden, Belgium, USA, and China. The new EX60 is manufactured in Sweden. The US factory makes the EX90, XC60, Polestar 3, and until recently the S60 sedan.
Scania is Swedish, too.
A Chinese company owns Volvo since 2010 or so.
Volvo Cars is still headquartered in Sweden, and employ 22.4k people in Sweden out of 40k globally[1].
Given that the market for Volvo is global, it seems to me that Volvo Cars is still overwhelmingly Swedish, while at the same time being overwhelmingly controlled by Geely.
[1]; https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vast/1000-personer-far-lam...
The car part of Volvo is owned by Geely, Volvo AB makes trucks, buses, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo
Volvo still produces cars in Sweden. Koenigsegg still build their cars in Ängelholm.
The Top Gear enthusiast in me loves that you included Koenigsegg in this conversation.
But including a company that hand-builds a handful of hypercars annually in a conversation about the auto industry in Sweden is not the flex you think it is.
But by that metric Canada also has a car industry? Canada builds 1.5M cars annually.
Sweden had a native car industry they decommissioned themselves, in short, they basically gave up, but they’re not alone Australia, New Zealand did the same and so did Canada, but they’re starting to realize that they were a little bit hasty in giving up….
Then last, but not least the UK basically threw the towel in too on a wide assortment of industries, but they’re now discovering that that was a big mistake.
New Zealand had car assembly which isn't a car industry.
Although my friend was working at an injection moulding company in Christchurch that did some parts for Holden (GM) in Australia.
Looking at Ford, GM, and Stellantis, one can say the US doesn't really have an auto industry either. Certainly not a car industry.
Why are you discounting Volvo?
>> Sweden does not have a car industry.
Apart from Volvo, Koenigsegg and Polestar and Scania. Apart from that, you’re right.
If Saab wanted to they could spin up a car factory as well. But they are more interested in selling these airplanes the article is about.
BTW, SAAB did produce cars from 1949. General Motors bought 51% of SAAB Automobile in 1990, and it was defunct in 2016.
As a Great Power, Sweden had a great need for engineers to build forts, canals and other important infrastructure for the Kingdom.
These engineers came in handy when the Industrial Revolution started.
Thus Sweden has a long history of manufacturing industry.
There are trade offs in all things. Trying to do everything yourself does also have a cost. It is not neccesarily better.
We have a larger partner speaking the same language and with a largely synonymous culture and a heavily integrated economy as our neighbour. The moment a Canadian company sees success -- in optics, autos, science, medicine, weaponry, etc. -- it is absorbed by a larger US company and suddenly is no longer Canadian, and in many cases any Canadian operations will usually get choked out.
There are few examples where this isn't the outcome.
This has happened across Canada for well over a century, across every sphere. And in the process the Canadian input is retconned out of existence and Americans ponder why Canada "doesn't make anything". They post ignorant nonsense about how Canada is resource extraction in a trench coat or similar nonsense.
Sweden had nothing like this, and they punch way above their weight class because of this. Though that has been changing, for instance with a Chinese company buying Volvo, etc.
The only protection against this is...protectionism, whether explicit controls or implicitly by ownership or funding structures. Canada became a leader in nuclear tech by the nuclear industry basically being government owned. It became a transportation powerhouse by a government owned railway. And so on.
Change is afoot. Carney has made significant efforts to stop just sending hundreds of billions to the US and most military procurement will focus on Canadian products and innovation. Which leads to lots of gnashing and screaming by propaganda rags like the US-owned PostMedia (yup, even a lot of our media gets absorbed by the US, at least where it isn't explicitly barred from doing so).
> Sweden had nothing like this
Not entirely true. AstraZeneca and ABB are examples that remain partly Swedish but many companies were merged into big multinationals and eventually marginalised.
FWIW, Ozempic, which seems popular, came from a Danish Pharma. There's very large pharma in Sweden, related to the UK.
Resources curse
Because Canada has been poorly managed for a long time by all political parties that have been voted in.
Saab makes excellent AWACS systems, this strikes me as a good choice. It'll be interesting to see if Canada also invests in the Gripen long-term, as a replacement for the aging CF-18 fleet.
The F-35 always seemed like a funny choice for a mainline fighter for Canada. Even the US has invested in many more F-15EXs. Having a Hi/Lo mix makes sense for a larger force, but equipping a smaller force with only exquisite birds doesn't seem to make much sense.
Then again, this is Canada - sensible decision making in military procurement just isn't something that happens here.
But the economies of scale are such that at least the $$ isn't completely out of whack (for purchase at least, maintenance I'm not so sure of). I would wager that the cost of maintaining those ancient CF-18s is pretty high now too though.
The F-15EX is designed to be a stand-off missile truck that works in tandem with a network of forward-deployed stealth jets. This compensates for the relatively low ordnance load-out of stealth jets. A stealth jet can designate and cue a target from the front using an F-15EX as a missile launcher safely in the back since it is non-stealthy.
The F-15EX isn't a particularly survivable aircraft on its own. It is a plane you'd only use if you have stealth jets and you plan to do air combat at scale. It augments the capabilities of something like an F-35 but isn't something you'd add to your fleet unless you had a lot of stealth aircraft.
The F-15A/C is designed to act as a missile truck, but the F-15EX was specifically designed to be a multirole strike fighter. You can operate it without putting 20 AMRAAMs on the pylon, or without an F-35 datalinked to it, and many countries do. The flexibility and heavy ordinance are the selling point at home and abroad.
Canada could very well operate the F-15EX without a fleet of stealth fighters. The F-35 is not an interceptor platform in any sense of the word, in an "all out" scenario like you're suggesting it's doubtful they would be any better than the CF-18 they have today.
I think the F-16 would have been a good bird for Canada's needs. The F-18 had the advantage of two engines, which strikes me as a good thing in the Arctic. If these two are off the table, things like the Saab are reasonable. There's only 2-3 countries one needs stealth fighters for, and 30-40-ish won't matter in such cases.
We've long pushed for 2 engines - which has made sense in the past. Even a successful ejection over the vast arctic would basically be a death sentence. Though some of our allies don't seem to have the same reservations, and it seems modern engines are a lot more reliable - certainly the F-35 only has one, so it looks like we're ok with it now.
The modern F-18's and the new F-15's would have also made sense, but agreed that modern F-16s would seem to be a nearly perfect fit if a single engine is now deemed acceptable. Given we like to keep equipment for as long as physically possible (and then some), the F-35 might have more runway (rimshot) in that regard though.
If the F-15 line is still in production, it's a damn fine bird and has broad mission capability. And the remaining B-52's are probably older that most of the HN community. At least those not retired or cashed out.
The F-16 lacks the range to operate effectively in Canada. They would need to load it up with multiple conformal or external fuel tanks, which wrecks performance, and would still need extensive tanker support.
Trump's damage to the USA will be studied extensively in the future.
Depends how much it gets damaged. There's a world where they won't know how to read in the future.
Completely understandable.
It's like when your favourite restaurant gets taken over by new management, and you discover cockroaches and maggots in your Trenette al Pesto
You switch restaurants.
> as the country seeks to reduce reliance on US defense firms
I wonder why ? I think we may be seeing a lot more of this.
Maybe we will get to see what US Corporations value more, real paying customers or large tax cuts w/stock buy back curtsy of US Gov Monetary Support.
The US wedgetail order was canceled and Canada can't afford to fund the program on its own. But slop journalists will spin a geopolitical angle because it gets clicks.
So, how this propaganda works is by presenting a false picture of reality by selective reporting.
Any time someone doesn't choose the US or moves away from the US, etc., or any time events can be remotely interpreted in that way, those stories will get submitted to and raised up to the front page of HN.
Any time someone DOES choose the US, or moves to the US, you will never, ever, ever, see a story about it on HN. They won't get submitted, and if they do, they won't get upvoted.
You only get shown the negative news that helps their agenda, and you never get shown the positive news that would hinder the picture of reality they're trying to place in your mind.
I can only tell you, as someone living in Europe, that there is a strong sentiment against the US at the moment. And this is new, at least in this magnitude. The US is not seen as a reliable partner anymore, but as a bully that sometimes cannot get avoided.
Strong sentiment against the US (government) in the US as well.
I live in a purple state (also a Canadian citizen but that's beside the point).
The essence of the this story is still true: many non-Americans are choosing non-US tech/products/services whenever they're faced with an alternative. Living in Sweden I see it around me all the time, and this is something no one even thought about two years ago.
It sounds like you've shifted from hardware purchases to immigration there. The US is indeed still a very popular place to emigrate to, though mostly from poor countries, and it's working very hard to limit immigrants from those countries.
You could take illegal immigration as a sign that the US is a very desirable place to be. But Americans don't seem proud of that, and consider it an economic downside.
But TFA is about military hardware, and more generally about dependence on the United States. Are there any good-news stories there, with economic upsides? I think there were some about the UK, but I'm hard pressed to think of more. At most, the stories I hear are about continuing existing relationships, not forming new ones, and seem to be more about not wanting to go through the cost of changing than about feeling positively towards the US.
> Any time someone DOES choose the US
There are 1,000 of those everyday. They get caught by the spam filter because it would pollute the front page. The ones that don't choose USA are somewhat interesting, so they get through.
We want to see the 1% and talk about those.
That's the first stage of grief, four to go
My only source of grief as a Canadian is the dismal state[1] of my country and the bleak prognosis for the future[2]. The whole "elbows up" thing is a convenient sideshow to take attention away from our domestic problems.
[1] https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/05/apple-on-bill-c-22-this-...
[2] https://www.bcbc.com/insight/oecd-predicts-canada-will-be-th...
While I completely agree with you on [1] and it's tiring to have to re-litigate this issue every few years, [2] was from 2021 and doesn't reflect Canada's current policies.
Canada's current policies seem like a continuation of their previous policies. The only major change is the weakening of links to the US, which is likely to make the economy worse, not better. Even bill C-22 is a zombie bill from the Trudea era (C-63). Tech investment is still flat (nearing zero)[1], taxes are up, and 20% of the workforce have government jobs[2]. This country is cooked.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-venture-cap...
[2] https://thehub.ca/2025/12/08/canada-added-950000-government-...
Yes, it is all a conspiracy.
Or. Have you considered that the erstwhile closest military ally of the US increasingly diversifying AWAY from US programs actually is pretty noteworthy. You have had canadians boycotting US products, cancel trips to the US, their PM encouraging elbows up attitude and delivering a pretty noteworthy speech in Davos about charting a course for middle powers and you think it’s business as usual?
May be you just come the conclusion that USA are the bad guys and and a lots of people hate them?
The fact that "man bites dog" gets reported while "dog bites man" does not is not propaganda.
Whose agenda do you think this is helping, exactly?
> Any time someone DOES choose the US, or moves to the US, you will never, ever, ever, see a story about it on HN.
That's because continuing as before is not a story. What a silly thing to say.
"Breaking News: the sky is blue today"