OTTAWA — As Canada approaches its second year of deciding whether to buy a full fleet of American-made F-35 fighter jets, Defence Minister David McGuinty is already thinking of joining a British-Italian-Japanese partnership working on a next-generation air force fighter.

Joining the so-called Global Combat Air Programme, or GCAP, could make it much harder for Canada to ditch its plan to buy 88 of the American planes and go with jets from Sweden’s Saab instead.

All three of the lead countries are major F-35 customers and intend for the GCAP plane—a next-generation fighter, more advanced than the F-35—to fly alongside those jets.

“It’s something that we’re examining,” McGuinty told The Logic this week, on his way out of an airplane hanger at the Ottawa airport where he’d announced funding for defence research. “It’s a possibility. We’re considering it.

McGuinty said he’s discussed the prospect of joining GCAP with Japanese officials and he’s keen to discuss it with Britain’s defence minister as well. He’s now with Prime Minister Mark Carney on a trip to Norway and the United Kingdom, reaching London on Sunday.

Joining GCAP is more than mere McGuinty musing. An open-data catalogue of government documents shows that in January, the Department of National Defence asked McGuinty’s deputy minister to sign off on a pitch to the boss. Its title: “Seeking minister of national defence support to join the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP).”

The Logic has filed an access-to-information request for the document but has not yet received a copy.

Canada is contractually committed to the first 16 of the F-35 jets it said it would buy; the Royal Canadian Air Force is preparing to bring the first of those home in 2028. The country has made initial payments on another 14. Yet for a year, since U.S. President Donald Trump launched a trade war and started threatening Canadian sovereignty, the government has been reviewing whether it will buy the other 72 it had intended.

Saab’s Gripen jets came second in the competition that landed on the F-35s and the company has been aggressively courting Canada’s business again, promising to build jets in Canada as just one element in a deep industrial integration.

Canada’s place in the F-35’s supply chain wouldn’t be directly affected by a decision to bail on the full acquisition, though it would mean 72 fewer planes to contribute to. Industry Minister Mélanie Joly has been pressuring prime contractor Lockheed Martin to deliver more economic benefits for Canada than originally agreed.

The Liberals are still weighing the benefits of each choice for Canadian industry and the consequences for Canada’s relationship with the United States, McGuinty said.

“We’re going to take the time we need to make sure this is properly evaluated before coming down to a final decision,” he said.

Filling out the air force fleet with Gripens would already mean managing parts, repairs, pilots and training for two different models at a time—potentially three, until the last of the air force’s aged CF-18s is grounded for good.

Supporting three different fighter jets indefinitely “would be quite the logistical hurdle from a sustainment and maintenance perspective,” said Alexander Salt, who studies defence innovation and procurement as a postdoctoral fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. “So I can’t imagine that that would develop.” 

The arguments over whether Canada can handle just F-35s and Gripens at the same time are intense enough, he said.

When those first 16 F-35s arrive, Canada will be part of the F-35 flyers’ club no matter what. The GCAP countries are senior members: Britain has been a first-tier member of the F-35’s development group, above Canada. Italy and Japan have F-35 assembly plants, the only ones outside the United States.

“The fact that we have three partners—three potential partners—who are F-35 nations, I think is fortuitous,” McGuinty said.

The U.K. is happy to talk to Canada about GCAP, said Megan Lalonde, a spokesperson for the British High Commission in Ottawa. “Together with Japan and Italy, we remain open to other partners joining the Global Combat Air Programme, while keeping on track with the programme schedule and delivering our future military capabilities,” she wrote in an email.

“GCAP is designed with its allies at its heart, and interoperability with current and future NATO combat air capabilities and platforms, including F-35, remains vital to the U.K. and our GCAP partners,” Lalonde added.

Saab says its Gripens are fully compatible with NATO systems; Gripen users include NATO members Hungary and the Czech Republic, in addition to Sweden. But if the Britain-Italy-Japan trio became a foursome with Canada, with an emphasis on F-35 compatibility, a Gripen-using RCAF would still be the odd one out.

Another consideration: GCAP is one of a very limited list of Canadian options for a future fighter jet.

The U.S. has Boeing working on its own next-generation jet, called the F-47. Whether those might eventually be sold to other countries isn’t clear, but their predecessor in the U.S. air force, the F-22, has never been exported. Congress even made doing so illegal, to protect the technological secrets in that plane.

When Trump announced that Boeing had won the competition just under a year ago, he said the U.S. might let allies buy a “toned-down” version. 

A third international program to develop new fighter jets, the German-French-Spanish Future Combat Air System (FCAS) program is seriously threatened by infighting between Germany’s Airbus and France’s Dassault. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz has reportedly already broached the possibility of bringing his country into GCAP.

For Canada, joining GCAP could make sense even if it never buys planes that come out of it, Salt said, just the way Canada signed up for the multinational program that produced the F-35 long before deciding to buy any.

“There’s a strong benefit to being involved in the R&D, the science, the engineering of it,” he said. Also, Canadian companies supply components for F-35s that other countries buy, and there are likely similar industrial benefits available if Canada joins GCAP.

What’s more, he said, joining a defence partnership with Japan—a friendly country but not one where Canada’s military connections are strong—would have diplomatic benefits.

“We can start to build this relationship and also increase our relationship with the European members through a practical mechanism,” Salt said.