The initial news that a spy balloon from China was hovering over the continental United States caught many people by surprise. We’re just not used to seeing that sort of thing happen.
It seemed so out of place for our times. It had the feel of something either historical, like out of the Cold War, or something futuristic, like in a science fiction novel.
We’ve grown accustomed to thinking that sort of stuff just doesn’t happen. Here’s the thing though: Now it does. Times have changed.
So it wasn’t that much of a shocker to learn that a second “unidentified object” appeared over Canadian airspace on the afternoon of Feb. 11.
“I ordered the take down of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posted to Twitter. “NORAD Command shot down the object over the Yukon. Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled, and a U.S. F-22 successfully fired at the object.”
Trudeau then posted: “I spoke with President Biden this afternoon. Canadian Forces will now recover and analyze the wreckage of the object. Thank you to NORAD for keeping the watch over North America.”
The object was shot down over central Yukon, a short distance from the Canada–U.S. border.
Defence Minister Anita Anand then gave a press conference later on Feb. 11, describing it as a “high-altitude airborne object” and explaining that “it was visually identified using NORAD fighter aircraft.” Anand said she wouldn’t be “speculating on the origins of this object” as it was “far too early in our analysis of the debris as we are still collecting.”
Yet all signs point to this being a repeat of the Chinese spy balloon.
Experts and gadflies on social media teased Trudeau’s posts because they seemed so presidential, as if Canada has total control over our skies and a military comparable to America’s. We obviously don’t.
Canada wouldn’t have handled this incident alone, and the shooting down of this object was no doubt first given the OK by the U.S. government before Trudeau then gave it his symbolic approval.
But all teasing aside, the question of Canada’s defence capabilities is a serious one. If we are entering a new era marked by geopolitical uncertainty and increasingly frosty relations with China—and all signs indicate that we are—then our defence matters more than it has in decades.
The general public isn’t talking about the issue enough. Our politicians and bureaucrats don’t feel the pressure on this file.
The discussion around how much of a prolonged ordeal it’s been to replenish our fighter jets has mostly focused on it being a bureaucratic boondoggle. But it’s also a national security boondoggle. Any decision that kicks the can down the road for another year or two is actually a decision that places our nation’s security at risk.
The F-35 procurement process was first announced in 2010, and it wasn’t until late last year that the Department of National Defence received approval to spend $7 billion on 16 F-35s. That’s the time span of the Second World War twice over just to purchase a little over a dozen jets. Heaven help us.
Canada’s current procurement of Navy and Coast Guards vessels is trending along similar lines. The national shipbuilding strategy, taken together, is the single largest expense the federal government has ever undertaken. The public generally isn’t aware of it though, and politicians don’t seem too focused on responsibly managing the file.
All signs indicate the Asia-Pacific region is where the action is going to be for the next few decades. Canadian vessels are already engaged in freedom of navigation operations in the Taiwan Strait, much to the chagrin of the Chinese Communist Party. If things erupt militarily, the experts say that’s where it’s going to happen.
We’ve also got a growing need to be able to better patrol the Arctic, which is driving some of our current replenishment efforts.
Canada is ill-equipped, though, to play any meaningful role in future challenges and to adequately defend our West Coast and Arctic. Due to a combination of our growing population and our Pacific exposure, it would be nice to think that we could commission an aircraft carrier in the next decade or so. But there’s just no way that’s going to happen given our current unambitious timelines.
The notion of defence capabilities and military procurement seems like a boring one for most people. Until one day it suddenly isn’t because of what’s happening around us.
