Diefenbaker was a small minded man. He had no vision of Canada as a great nation. He killed a world class aviation industry for no apparent reason. We are still paying the price for his lack of vision and leadership.
I said, “since”. That should tell you something about the successive PM’s, imo.
The reason why the Avro was killed, was because the US military was wanting to move away from manned jets to missiles, or so they said anyways. That pretty much left us high and dry as far as jet-plane development goes. We would have spent billions and had nothing to show for it. It wasn’t viable, regardless of how good it was.
I will admit to being a Westerner who felt used at being little more than cannon fodder for the federal parties.