It's good that you point out the word “fair”, because that's a really difficult part to parse.
The problem is that this can't be almost an equitable competition. As Mr. Nossal pointed out, the joint strike fighter program is much newer than many of the other options, except for the Gripen. It's significantly more capable. Basically, Canada's participation within the joint strike partnership industrial benefits program should have given it a very large leg-up on all the other options.
What you saw in 2010 was that when the initial evaluation was done by the Department of National Defence and the government, the understanding was that because it's much more capable and significantly less costly, and the industrial benefits were so much more skewed to the F-35, there was no competition required. It would waste taxpayers' dollars to undertake a competition at that time.
Now we fast-forward to 2015 and the current FFCP process. At that time, they had to change the evaluation criteria in order to give other options the ability to compete. There was no way for them to compete fairly in a lot of capability areas or in the industrial benefits aspects, or to at least let them have a plausible chance of winning.
When you say “fair”, it's a very difficult challenge to make a competition when one capability is significantly more capable, less costly and whatnot, so that others can have the chance to compete.