Yes, we can't afford to be ready for every imaginable circumstance. Maybe we could if we could imagine a budget as big as we wanted it to be, just magically, and then we could be ready for any scenario we could dream up. But the fact is that we live within the confines of our finances and other competing needs, like social programs and other things. So these all have to be weighed together.
The point is that the F-35 is designed to be first over the beaches in a shock and awe type of mission. That's what you would have the stealth for, in order to have the radar-evading capability for ground defences. That is in the unlikely situation that they would actually activate ground-based air defences, because once the radars light up, then they reveal their location, as I'm sure you probably know. But that's what the role of the F-35 would be. Some have described it as a bomb truck. It's meant to go in on the first strike on the way to Tehran or somewhere like that. I can't imagine any situation where Canada would be involved in the first wave of strikes like that.
Let me just draw one quick comparison to the F-22. If stealth were so required now for a type of mission when you're first in over the beaches to take out air defences, you would imagine that the attack on Libya would have been led by F-22s. It wasn't. They never deployed the F-22s to Libya. The Americans held them back—I think maybe because they're so expensive and they didn't want to risk losing any of them—and they didn't really need to use them, because all the air defences were taken out with British and American cruise missiles.