Donald Trump says Canada has asked to join the missile-defence program his administration is building, adding a new chapter to a long-running cross-border saga.
The U.S. president dropped that news in the Oval Office on Tuesday as he unveiled the initial plans for a three-year, $175 billion USÂ project to build a multi-purpose missile shield he’s calling the Golden Dome.
“Canada has called us and they want to be a part of it,” Trump said. “They want to hook in and they want to be a part of it.”
Canada will pay its “fair share,” he added. “We’ll work with them on pricing.”
There was no immediate comment from Ottawa.Â
What this means is still extremely murky. It’s unclear what, exactly, Canada would contribute; what its responsibilities would include; what it would pay; and how different this arrangement would be from what Canada already does under the Canada-U.S. NORAD system.
Refused to join
Canada has long participated in tracking North American skies through NORAD, and feeds that data into the U.S. missile-defence program.
But Canada never officially joined the U.S. missile program, which was a source of controversy in Ottawa in the early 2000s when Prime Minister Paul Martin’s government refused to join.
That previous refusal means Canadians can monitor the skies but not participate in any decision about when to launch a hypothetical strike against incoming objects.
New developments have forced the long-dormant issue back onto the agenda.Â
For starters, the U.S. is creating a new system to track various types of missiles — one more sophisticated and multi-layered than Israel’s Iron Dome, intended to detect intercontinental, hypersonic and shorter-range cruise weapons.Â
And this happens to be occurring as Canada’s sensors in the Arctic are aging out of use. Canada has committed to refurbishing those sensors.
The first public indication that these combined factors were fuelling a policy shift in Canada came in public comments made earlier this year in Washington.
One U.S. senator said, in February, that he’d heard interest in the missile program from a Canadian colleague, then-defence minister Bill Blair.
Blair publicly acknowledged the interest, saying that, given the upgrades being planned by both the U.S. and Canada, the partnership “makes sense.”
But the form of Canadian participation is, again, unclear. The U.S. commander for NORAD appeared recently to suggest that Canada’s participation will be limited to tracking threats.
One missile-defence analyst says it sounds like an extension of existing Canada-U.S. co-operation through NORAD. Still, says Wes Rumbaugh, it’s interesting that Trump chose to draw attention to it. Trump mentioned Canada’s role several times, unprompted, during his announcement Tuesday.
As for the president’s three-year timeframe, Rumbaugh calls it a longshot. He predicts that only part of the system could be built in that time, and that it will take more years, and sustained funding, to complete.
“This is still a significant challenge,” said Rumbaugh, a fellow in the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank in Washington.
“We’re talking about sort of a next-generation and a widely enhanced missile-defence system. We’re talking about a step-change evolution in American air and missile defence systems that will require significant investment over potentially a long time period.”
