followed by the equally abrupt laying off of the Avro workers, a move aimed as a power play to force the government to reconsider. Instead, Diefenbaker ordered all the planes, plans, and data destroyed. Thus, much of the evidence of the greatest achievement in Canadian aviation was eliminated. An additional explanation is that if other countries took an interest in the plane after it was cancelled, but not destroyed, the government would have looked foolish.
Instead, Canada bought sixty-four used Voodoo jet fighters from the U.S. that were barely capable of breaking the sound barrier. The purchase price was $260 million or about $4 million a plane. While some say we could have bought 130 Arrows for that price, that is mythology. The cost per Arrow had climbed to $12 million, or twenty-one Arrows for the same price as the sixty-four Voodoos.
Over time, the Arrow has become a powerful symbol of Canadian prowess, of Canadian leadership, of a path not taken. It is easy to understand the symbolic power of a fighter jet. It is a projection of national force and requires a sophisticated infrastructure to produce, or significant wealth to be able to purchase.
For Canada to design, develop, and build perhaps the leading fighter jet of the era meant, and means, we were succeeding as a very sovereign nation. In building a fighter jet, Canada was making a statement — we can compete with the Americans. We can go into the world without always being contextualized by our relationship to the Americans and their power.
Part of the Arrow mythology is that the plane was the world’s most advanced jet-fighter interceptor. Even today, many decades later, the most sophisticated plane in the Canadian Forces — the American-built CF-18 — falls short of some performance levels anticipated of the Arrow had it gone into production.
So how good was the Arrow really? It was an elegant plane, but perhaps not superior. Other planes also almost reached Mach 2 and flew just as high in 1958. How has this fine but not extraordinary airplane taken on such mythic proportions? Canada is not a principal power, nor do we aspire to become one. So why so much angst about the demise of the Arrow?
A lot of the torment has to do with the way it was ended. It would have been better if we could have worked with partners to develop and sell the plane. That might have occurred if we had been more practical, if we had seen the strengths of the plane clearly without the distorting effects of national pride and issues of sovereignty. Instead, we allowed internal partisan struggles to contribute to fuzzy decision making. In the process, we have created a potent and powerful myth that tells us more about ourselves than it does about the airplane.
The fact that Canadians have this strong response to the Arrow tells us we want to be an independent force in the world. We want to develop the infrastructure and technologies to support leading industries. We want to be able to say to ourselves, “We can do it.” And we can, but we have to be smart about it. We have to recognize that our tight collaboration with the Americans is an association we can use to advance ourselves, although it also threatens to smoother us. We must always find the path that allows us to do the former without succumbing to the latter. To travel this critical route, we must not fall victim to the dangers of a false debate between rejecting and embracing the United States.
We turned down American assistance for the Arrow as unwanted charity. Yet, we had got ourselves into a project that was beyond our national means. We made a choice that lost us tens of thousands of jobs, cutting-edge technology, and an immense pool of talent that other countries — mostly the U.S. — put to use.
We must learn to work with America, understand the reality of our situation, and recognize that its pull — continentalism — is a force of nature. To survive, Canada must harness, temper, control, discipline, and manage this relationship in our interest — not fecklessly succumb to it.
It’s not a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them.” That’s a cliché that contributes to foolish, unhelpful, polarized debate. We neither should want to beat them nor join them, but rather work with them to advance what we define as our interests.
We’ve got to stop characterizing the U.S., a huge and powerful country, as a villain. Such a conceptualization confounds our ability to figure out who we are and how we sensibly fit into North America and the world. It also confuses our thinking both about what makes sense for us and about what we want.
The Arrow points out a tension between our pride and our capacity. Let’s get it right from now on. The Arrow shows how we got it dramatically wrong.
Part of why the Arrow sticks in our craw is that for one poignant moment we had the ability to be top gun, to be better than our omnipresent and dominant neighbours.
One of the most memorable moments in the made-for-TV CBC movie, The Arrow, comes when the test pilot says to his passenger: “Let’s go and wake up the Yanks over at Niagara Air Force base.” As they shoot past the base, an American in the control tower says: “What the hell was that?” Well “that” for us was the fleeting pleasure of doing something better than the Americans, and doing it first. And “that” has nothing to do with being anti-American. It’s simply about being Canadian and being proud of it. A pro-Canadian moment does not have to be an anti-American one.
Notes
1. The documentary The Plain Truth is described as “an investigation of the real story behind Canada’s most famous aircraft that also explores the debate over its demise.” In the documentary, one of Canada’s leading and most celebrated historians, Professor Jack Granatstein, is interviewed at length. He is asked “Were the Americans the villains?” This is his answer: “To say the Americans killed it is, I think, simply not true. In fact, the Secretary of the Air Force in 1958 told the Canadian ambassador that if Canada wanted the Americans would buy the Arrows and give them to the RCAF. In other words: to try to keep production going the Americans would actually give us some of our own aircraft. The Canadian ambassador, however, thought this was charity and said Canada had never accepted aid and this wouldn’t fly.”
The documentary can be found most readily as a special feature on the DVD of the 1997 made for TV CBC movie The Arrow.
PART II
Continental Dance: Managing the Relationship
3
Basic Steps
There is no big solution in our dealings with the United States. Rather, we need to take basic steps and adopt fundamental principles to guide and manage the relationship. To do this we must appreciate how the U.S. system of government works, and how the relationship with our neighbour functions so that we make decisions based on our interests and not our fears, emotions, feelings, ideologies, and old habits of thinking.
Our discussion about the U.S. relationship is senselessly polarized. Our debate amounts to left-nationalists saying integration is bad, stop it, and right-continentalists saying it’s good, bring it on. It is time for a change, an opportunity for a more constructive debate.
The U.S. is our best friend, whether we like it or not. It cannot be avoided or dispensed with and it’s not a kind of enemy. The real issue is what our interests are. We can’t avoid the U.S., yet we have to be mindful that one does not integrate with the U.S. but into the U.S. Ours is a relationship of two nations, and of the interdependence of two economies. By necessity our friendship with the U.S. needs to be a wary one, as we are a separate country benignly under siege. As a culture, English Canada is somewhat fragile — it’s the only OECD country that doesn’t have a home-grown drama among its ten most popular TV programs.[1]
We must not be shy about giving our government a mandate to advance our interests. We are a medium-sized country bordering the world’s hegemonic power. Our leading industries have been dropping like
