Comment by multiplegeorges 7 hours ago
> If Canada wanted to, we could easily scale military spending by investing it in homegrown projects instead of spending it at the altar of the mililtary industrial complex.
We're about to find out if we want to. This is a major point in Carney's defence plan.
Russia's weapons exports have cratered (because their products aren't living up to the hype) and US exports will be shakey since countries can't trust us anymore.
South Korea was already finding export success in Europe for general military equipment. Eastern Europe is paying big bucks to not be Ukraine 2. The market is ripe for new entrants.
Meanwhile NATO has been stuck with 80s equipment with a hundred upgrade packages for quite some time. It's a great time to offer brand new products. Specifically tanks and AFVs are an open market right now. Anti-Air is also an open market, since Russian units are all exploded in Ukraine so they don't exactly have any stock to export and the Patriot is good but expensive and from an untrustworthy partner.
Domestic development is an investment in your own country, it develops and pays skilled labor and supporting industries. When you buy jets from America, virtually all of that money is gone from Canada forever, funneled into America with Canada getting nothing out of it besides a jet which will need spare parts also from America, technicians from America, and after some years will need to be replaced with another American jet because after you've stabbed your own domestic industry in the back now you have no other choice than to continue buying foreign.
By that argument we should do that with everything. Maybe...with tariffs? /s
Doing that is more expensive and means we get us less for more - and we'd almost still rely on other countries for components and resources. All being equal, it is better to buy foreign goods cheaper and then have money leftover to focus on investing what you're good at. Canada is too small to economically fully design and build a modern plane, engines, missiles, radar, etc to compete with the US, China, etc. We certainly can't afford to do that with everything else, as well.
There are absolutely overriding strategic and security reasons you may want to do some of this anyways, but as a general rule we'd be far better diversifying our defence alliances (eg buying a mix from France, Korea, Japan, US, UK, etc) plus having something really good to offer said allies so we can be interdependent. Countries (including the US as we're learning) are not more powerful when the go it alone.
Protected industries almost always get lazy and noncompetitive. Canada is building our own version of the Type 26 frigate for almost double the cost per boat of Australia and the UK (which already ate the design costs!) despite the fact that we're going to be building the most of them so we should in theory scale cheaper. There are some reasons for that (they will be the most capable type 26's afloat), but it's mostly just because the government wants to subsidize Irving and east coast shipbuilders and there's no real scale or expertise because they literally can't market their work outside of Canada.
"On top of that, Canada's defence civil service is terrible at procurement."
You could remove "defence" from that and describe almost every large company or gov't in this country, too.
We need a moral and civil reform in this country, to really build again like we used to. Civic spirit revival.
Look at the joke of the Eglinton LRT, or even more so the Hamilton LRT. Even when we commit to building things, it turns into a swamp of mismanagement and a game of political hot potato.
Most embarassing thing about the Eglinton LRT is it sounds like its our (software) profession that is to blame for the latest series of dysfunctions. I'm disgusted.
We shall see. Big words, but this country has a history of doubling down on mediocrity and parochial interests.
I personally would love to contribute in whatever way I could to homegrown manufacturing, tech, and maybe even defence sector, and am willing to put in the hours and even compensation cut to make things happen in this country.
I just hope there's investors out there willing to make things happen, and that the gov't doesn't just do its usual thing of protecting a few existing corporate buddies.
As a Canadian, I have mixed feeling about this. You can develop and build domestic defence industries, but it only becomes economical if you can develop an export market. Even then, the inputs for parts/resources are still global.
Sweden has one heck of a domestic defence industry, but it's tailor made for its requirements and expensive. The SAAB Gripen is one of the best planes in the world for what it was designed to do: operate dispersed off of regional roads when your main infrastructure is destroyed or unavailable. But its flyway cost is the same as an F-35 because hundreds have been built instead of thousands. And the Gripen's engine is still from General Electric.
The NLAW anti-tank weapon is a good example of export success. It was developed jointly with the British and has had a lot of exports and proven success in Ukraine.
On top of that, Canada's defence civil service is terrible at procurement. Even when we buy foreign, we manage to drive up the costs to the point where its rediculously price just to shove in some domestic "advantage", rather than focusing that money on stuff we are really good at (we tend to kick ass at sonar and anti-sub tech, for example).