After years of opposing the purchase of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II fighter jets, Canada’s Liberal government has announced their intention to begin negotiations to purchase eighty-eight of the aircraft to replace the country’s CF-18 fleet. The about-face comes twelve years after the Conservative government of former prime minister Stephen Harper undertook, in principle, a sole-source contract to buy sixty-five of the fighters. The decision comes a further two and a half decades after Canada joined the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter development program. The move has drawn criticism from all quarters as a case study in waste, inconsistency, sleight of hand, and defense orthodoxy.

The Liberals either lied about buying the jets or broke a promise not to buy them. Whether you oppose or support their purchase, Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015 on an express promise to walk away from the F-35s and enter into “an open and transparent competition.” Along the way, there have been signs dropped that the promise was always an empty one, such as the flip-flop on the pledge to withdraw from the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. Nevertheless, as Mitch Heimpel writes in his “short history of our F-35 debacle,” the Liberal platform stated, “We will not buy the F-35 stealth fighter bomber.”

After their election win of 2015, the Liberals temporized, bought dodgy used jets from Australia, and began the procurement process anew before arriving back where they started — a journey from A to B and then back to A again. Except that the return to their starting position was marked by amendments allowing more money to be spent — an estimated but sure-to-climb $19 billion CAD — and, along the way, buying more jets than the Conservatives had planned to.