Unmanned makes a huge difference in many ways, surely. There are all kinds of constraints added by the need to carry around a squishy human, and evaluating what can be done without them is not something I’m going to attempt in a comment here but there are a whole lot of possibilities, many of which might not cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

We’ve been keeping squishy human humans alive in planes for a while, we already know how it works. An autonomous aircraft would require you to develop a high sophisticated computer/AI model that can do basic pilot tasks which will be a big part of your development cost. For now, sticking a human in his much cheaper. Sure, you might save money per unit and in the long run, but the development cost will most certainly be much higher.

You also need a reliable way to communicate with them, so you’d want a constellation of military communication satellites. Not sure Canada currently has that, so factor in the cost for satellite development a bunch of rocket launches.

Even if the attempt failed it would be a better use of the money.

If the attempts failed, Canada would be left without a fighter jet. If that is an acceptable outcome to you, you might consider not spending money on it at all.

But if you want to have an operational fighter jet in the short term, buying one is the only option.

Yeah, no. Even if they were extremely efficient, 75 billion might get you a prototype or two, but you still haven’t acquired a single plane or paid for its operating cost or maintenance. Developing an manned vs unmanned fighter also doesn’t make much difference, though you will save on the cost of pilot training later.

The F-35 contract includes all of that already.

So no, just using the money that is set aside for the F-35 would get you nowhere. Especially considering Canada doesn’t have much experience with developing domestic fighter jets and would also need to build all the infrastructure from scratch as well.

We’re talking somewhere over $200 billion dollars.

That certainly would be enough, you’d need at least $100 billion to start developing a new 6th gen airframe.

In contrast, the current deal for the F-35 is only for $27 billion.

You’ll need a lot more money than that to develop a new airframe from scratch …