Canada doesn’t talk about the Avro Arrow because it’s nostalgic. It talks about the Arrow because it’s unfinished business. Every time Ottawa finds itself boxed in on defence procurement, every time the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) tries to remind Canada who it thinks really owns North American air power, the Arrow reappears. It doesn’t show up as an engineering debate or a budget line. It shows up as a question of sovereignty.

Who decides what flies over Canada, who maintains it, who upgrades it, and who gets the final say when politics intrudes on defence?

Right now, that question is back on the table. Canada is reviewing whether to proceed with the full purchase of eighty-eight F-35s, having paid for only the first sixteen. Alternatives are being openly discussed. Saab’s Gripen is back in the conversation. France’s Rafale lurks on the margins. And hovering above all of it is an unmistakable warning from Washington: if Canada walks away from the F-35, the United States will “fill the gaps,” even if that means American fighters flying more often in Canadian airspace and changes to NORAD itself.

That kind of pressure has a way of waking old ghosts. The Avro Arrow is the loudest one. To understand why the Arrow still matters, you have to strip away the mythology and look at what it actually was.

In the early 1950s, Canada faced a strategic reality that’s easy to forget today. The shortest route for Soviet bombers carrying nuclear weapons to reach American cities ran straight over the Canadian Arctic. Canada wasn’t a junior partner in continental defence. It was the forward line, much like Ukraine or the Baltics are today.

The Royal Canadian Air Force initially tried to stretch the life of the CF-100 Canuck, a solid but subsonic interceptor jet. That effort ran into physics. You can only ask so much from an airframe designed for an earlier threat environment.

By 1953, the RCAF issued Specification AIR 7-3, a document that reads like something written by a country that took its own defence seriously. The new interceptor needed to reach Mach 1.5 at 50,000 feet within minutes of takeoff. It needed long range, rapid turnaround, and the ability to operate from relatively short runways scattered across a vast, cold country.

The RCAF surveyed American, British, and French designs and concluded that nothing on offer met the requirement. So, Canada decided to build its own.

That decision alone placed Canada in rare company. Designing a front-line interceptor from scratch is something only a handful of nations have ever done successfully. It requires industrial depth, political will, and a tolerance for risk that democracies often struggle to maintain.

Avro Canada took on the challenge.

The CF-105 Arrow was not “ahead of its time” in the lazy way that phrase often gets used. It was simply advanced, full stop.........

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