So we're looking at buying 30 year-old F/A-18 jets from Australia or Kuwait to replace our 33 year-old CF-18 jets?

I guess they might have slightly lower mileage, but I think it would be generous to even describe this as a "stop gap solution"!  Plus we would probably need to spend a bunch of money upgrading them to after we pick up these near-end-of-life used fighters.

What a fluster cluck this government is making of the whole situation!  Chretien, Martin and Harper all failed to sort this procurement out properly, but Trudeau seems to be taking the failure to a whole new level of incompetence!