The Swedish defence firm Saab is considering Canada as a place to assemble Gripen fighter jets as it moves to quickly ramp up production to meet demand from Ukraine.
Saab’s CEO Micael Johansson said in recent interviews with financial news publications that Kyiv’s interest in purchasing more than 100 Gripen fighter jets would double the defence company’s production requirements.
The Financial Times and the Reuters news agency reported Johansson said the company is searching for ways to expand production capacity, possibly in Canada or elsewhere in Europe.
On the sidelines of the Canadian Aerospace Summit in Ottawa, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly told The Canadian Press Wednesday this is “good news” and that she spoke with Johansson earlier in the day.
“I’ve been actively working with Saab to see what can be done to do more partnerships with Canada, and it starts with the GlobalEye [surveillance plane], but also we’re willing to see what we can do to help support Ukraine,” she said.
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U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra has bristled over the idea that Canada could procure a mixed fighter fleet and has warned it would be incredibly expensive for a country like Canada to maintain two fleets.
The US imperialists want us completely dependent on their hardware. We’re a “just a resource economy” to the fascists.
Pete Hoekstra doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in our news media. As an ambassador, the only thing he’s good at is pissing off his host country.
Just remember Ottawa restaurants chefs. Make sure his food is really well prepared with only finest ingredients and care.
Saab is putting more on the table to get Canada to purchase the Gripen fleet, while Petty tries to say Canada is to small to not bow down to Trump.
It’s a shame Gripen uses a motor produced by GM in America which apparently can’t be replaced for whatever reason. This has the potential to make it incompatible with the EU home made requirements for the frozen russian assets to be used. I guess trump could even embargo that to prevent competition from switching to Gripen from F-can’t remember the number.
Yucky second term Trudeau government got us into this F-35 garbage deal.
There’s a long history to the F35 purchase and I wouldn’t lay it all on Trudeau after all the sunk costs. I’d more lay it on Stephen Harper for not exploring other options.
Google AI summary
The procurement became a politically contentious issue, particularly after the Conservative government announced the F-35 as the sole option without a competitive bidding process in 2010.
