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 the OP says, Carney has a clear, explicit policy of reducing military (and also economic) dependence on the US, for obvious reasons. It's what Carney is best known for, his leading international affairs and economic policies.

Every time a similar story, of a country turning away from US trade, is posted HN, people post that it's not political. Not only is that claim thin and largely unsbustantiated, but why is it such a focus?

> With European military renaissance and the SAAB gear proving itself in Ukraine

Btw, we just got this news report here in Sweden:

Sweden is giving Gripen jets to Ukraine

https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/vr3znL/uppgift-sverige-...

Aftonbladet is Sweden's largest daily newspaper. They have a fairly strong track record on government and defense scoops.

The supposed announcement is tomorrow morning, local/CEST.

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.

Do military versions of aircraft use the same production lines, and the same production queue, as commercial aircraft?

What does a commercial backlog have to do with an aircraft for military purposes? I'm sure there is a different lane for military aircraft. Anyone ordering an aircraft for military purposes is not going to sit on the same waiting list as a commercial airline.

Canada is aligning itself with it's European Allies. Several EU NATO members have chosen the same aircraft over Boeing.

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)

You people on site are so deluded. “Abusive American relationship”? You mean the one where you guys got to literally spend next to nothing for decades on your militaries while we played bad guy international trade mafia for you? Get real.

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.

> 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.

Something new please. We should be looking forward not pining for what could have been.

The future of air superiority, particularly with respect to sovereign defence is passive or quantum radar, autonomous A2/AD and directed energy.

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.

> "Even if American equipment is superior ..."

To address the article's context, is the E-3 Sentry superior to the Erieye/GlobalEye?

> 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

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.

It's kind of insane they trusted us to begin with. Why?

Vastly inferior and overpriced. From now till delivery the US will blackmail the buyer with delays and increase the agreed upon price at least 3 times. Standard practice.

aside from political alignment, theres a lot of geographic, budget and climate and stategic alignments that would put swdeen designers in the same headspace.

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.

> * 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.

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.

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.

From the article:

> Saab is also in the running to sell Canada some of its Gripen fighters.

The Iran war has uncovered a vulnerability of the USAF's approach to basing. The USAF likes to build large, elaborate air bases. Many of the bases used to attack Iran have been hit by Iran.[1][2]

Large air bases are tough to defend from drones and missiles in quantity. There are anti-drone weapons, but now that drones are used by the thousands and tens of thousands, some of the attacks will get through. A major air base is a big, fat, soft target. Both the US and Russia have recently found this out the hard way. Air forces now need to disperse and hide. Saab, which stresses operating from minimal airfields and roads, has aircraft better suited to that.[3]

Stealth may not help as much, especially for fighters. Geometric stealth, which is designed to reflect radar beams to anywhere except straight back, doesn't help for bistatic and multi-static radar. All the players in the current wars have some of those systems now.

So, as in WWII, air operations anywhere near the enemy require dispersal.

[1] https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/iran-strikes-us-bases-mid...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/01/world/middleeast/iran-str...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyD0liioY8E

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.

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.

Yes. They're paying Sweden. It's in the title.

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.

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).

Not that it invalidate your point, but Sweden has 1/4 the population of Canada, not 1/10.

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)”.

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.

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).

Resources curse

Because Canada has been poorly managed for a long time by all political parties that have been voted in.

Depends how much it gets damaged. There's a world where they won't know how to read in the future.

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.

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...

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.

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.

> 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

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"