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Why Canada Needs to Walk Away from NORAD

The defence pact that protected us now leaves us dangerously dependent on Washington

An intercontinental ballistic missile is detected. At first, disbelief, confusion, then a realization: the missile comes from an unknown submarine, probably North Korean, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. A nuclear-tipped nightmare is headed toward the United States.

NORAD once served Canada’s interests, but growing divergence with the US means defence integration now threatens our sovereignty

Rather than centring policy on NORAD, Canada should align itself with NATO’s defence strategies

The US–Canada relationship would remain essential, but NATO-centred framework would give Canada greater defence sovereignty

American officials calculate that the target is Chicago, with a projected 10 million casualties.

Interception efforts fail. The US president is rushed from a school basketball event and forced to make a decision about how to retaliate and against who.

The scenario is straight out of the Netflix thriller A House of Dynamite. It’s only a movie, but the ticking of the doomsday clock and the terrifyingly compressed decision-making cycle (twenty minutes, more or less) are absolutely realistic.

Something else is realistic—the absence of any Canadian uniforms in any of the defence command centres the film depicts. The warning of the missile strike comes into the US Strategic Command from a sea-based floating radar platform. The interception efforts are US-controlled from a US missile base in Alaska.

There are no scenes involving the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a defence agreement dating back to 1957 between Canada and the United States, designed to protect both countries’ airspace. The retaliatory decision is entirely that of the US president and commander in chief.

American warning, American fingers on the nuclear trigger. Canadian decision makers are nowhere in the loop. Toronto is about 700 kilometres downwind from Chicago, child’s play for a radioactive cloud with the prevailing winds typically moving north and east. Canada is off-screen collateral damage.

A House of Dynamite was designed, as its makers have attested, to “start a conversation” about the nuclear threat. It’s time we had our own conversation in Canada—about nuclear war, of course, but also about the relevance of NORAD and the significance of those missing uniforms in a new geostrategic age.

Most Canadians probably think of NORAD, when they do, as that nice outfit that tracks Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. But as its seventieth anniversary approaches, we need to ask: What’s its continuing value for Canada? Does it still offer Canada greater protection, or has it become a liability for Canadian sovereignty and security?

These questions become all the more pressing as Canada accelerates the modernization and re-equipment of its armed forces and reconsiders its defence strategy.

As a boy, I grew up with NORAD. My father, who joined the Royal Canadian Air Force early in World War II, was posted to the former Richards-Gebaur air force base in Kansas City, Missouri, in the 1960s. The base was the command headquarters of the Central NORAD Region and contained a hardened bunker facility.

Later, he served as a NORAD deputy commander, posted to Great Falls, Montana. He was the first person I ever knew to carry a pager (a big, clunky thing with a red light and a beeper) to alert him to any warnings of air attacks against North America. It was always going off (false alarms), and it meant we could never go to the movies together. There wasn’t a whole lot else to do in Great Falls. But it did host an ICBM missile wing and a major Strategic Air Command (SAC) base. As the doctrine of mutually assured destruction—or MAD—took hold, his job had shifted from intercepting bombers to providing early warning of missile launches, giving the US time to launch a nuclear retaliation. I will never forget the signs posted outside the SAC base with its official motto: “Peace is our Profession.”

NORAD........

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