Comment by hylaride

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 they 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.

I think the US defence industry really is going to be hurting for awhile for the trustworthiness reason alone. The Patriot was under-promised and over-delivered as shown in Ukraine (the Americans seemed happy to let people think that its teething problems in the first Gulf war were still a factor), but even if you buy it the supply is constrained to a country with what we can now describe at best a "mercurial" political system.

Russia's exports have more cratered because they're focusing on domestic demand, but they still have a market for developing countries fighting amungst themselves that the west won't supply. The one exception is India, which will likely pivot to more western kit as they have border issues with China.

Korea already had a domestic industry for various strategic reasons with North Korea being next door (if a global war became hot, they could be cut off from artillery ammunition sources, so it makes sense for them to make sure they can manufacture their own, even if its more expensive), so they're in a position to capitalize. Canada's reasons to do the same (massive arctic defence) doesn't have much of an export market, though we are teaming up with the Scandinavian countries for icebreakers.

Yeah, I was trying to remain in scope to defence-related issues, but I don't disagree with you. I'm holding out some small sliver of hope that all the recent geopolitical events will finally wake us up, but I'm not holding my breath.