Why won't Canada build their own fighter jet?

They did, for a bit.

The US government was pressuring the Canadian government into buying Boeing BOMARC anti-air missile systems instead, arguing that the missiles would be cheaper (and the Arrow wasn’t exactly cheap, especially since it didn’t have international customers). That does have its merits, although I could also argue that missiles are “one-shot” weapons while an interceptor can be assigned to do more than just shooting down unwanted airplanes.

But it all came crashing down with the Avro Arrow program.

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On hindsight, perhaps what they should have done was what China did: Protect the local industry at all cost, regardless of the product. The Chinese government bought Chinese-made copies of Soviet airplanes and that let the industry mature even if they probably could have gotten something better elsewhere. Now China has a massive aviation industry that has already surpassed the Russians.

The Arrow was a Mach 2+ interceptor meant to defend Canada (and the US by extension) from Soviet nuclear bombers. It was a fairly advanced designed for the time (1950s) and had serious potential, on top of looking absolutely sexy.

However, what it didn’t do well was in the political dimension. At the time, there was a shift from nuclear airplane bombers to ICBMs, potentially rendering the Arrow and similar interceptors pointless (it did not, but it looked like it was going that way).

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Canada still makes airplanes through companies like Bombardier and De Havilland Canada, though for hi-tech military airplanes like F-35 they have to rely on everyone else. And by everyone else, it’s basically US companies.

It’s a classic case of how management can bugger anything into oblivion, no matter how good the product is.

While the Canadian aerospace sector is very unlikely to get anywhere near the US in size, the past few weeks demonstrated that things are changing in ways nobody could have predicted and a little self-sufficiency is probably smart.

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But long story short, the Canadian government and the Avro management ended up playing a game of chicken in an effort to retain the Arrow—and that ended up with the government shuttering the program and led to Avro putting all of its employees (as well as those in the supply chain) out of work because of how sudden it was. Many of their engineers migrated down south to work at NASA and elsewhere, so it was impossible to rebuild the institution again without spending money Canada simply do not have.