Most of the used fighter jets bought by Canada are still not in service, MPs hear

That is the Super Hornet AESA radar, a very large leap in capability as compared to APG-73 they got in their PHASE 1 and 2 upgrades. I am not sure their current computers can handle all the data from it though...my guess is they will find out it isn't just slapping a new advanced radar onto the jet, it will need significant increase in computational ability as well.

IMHO, the biggest mistake the Liberals made on this file was insisting on industrial offsets (jobs) here in Canada. I know it's standard policy for most big purchases in Canada, but with so few aircraft manufacturers in the West, it's a huge handicap.

If they hadn't done that, we probably would have gotten Typhoons, instead Airbus pulled it from the competition. Saab has essentially no chance for the same reason, so we're going to wind up with either the F-35, which the Liberals refused to buy in 2015, or the Super Hornet, built by the company that kneecapped Bombardier in 2017.

Sigh...

Procurement is such a joke, leave it to us to screw a straightforward process up.

Local companies complicate the process massively and virtually guarantee corruption, i.e. the same problem as our great Canadian cellular phone/TV/internet network. With military kit (among allies, obviously) the mantra should be, get the best deal possible regardless of the supplier�s country.