It’s still not clear what U.S. or Canadian intelligence a Chinese surveillance balloon managed to collect from high above North America last week before it was shot out of the sky — an option Canada rejected because it posed no threat to public safety.
The U.S. has the lead on analyzing the balloon, which was downed Sunday off the South Carolina coast, and Canada is not directly involved, said Defence Minister Anita Anand, whose two days in Washington culminated Friday in a meeting at the Pentagon.
Through Norad, the jointly commanded continental defence system, both the U.S. and Canada monitored the balloon’s week-long journey from the Aleutian Islands off Alaska to its violent demise over the Atlantic Ocean at the hands of an F-22 Raptor fighter pilot.
But the minister offered no further details about where exactly the balloon was when Canada first learned of the incursion.
“We were ... examining the trajectory and analyzing the balloon, including the height of the balloon and the contents of the balloon, and determined that it posed no imminent risk to Canadians at all,” Anand said.
“The analysis of the balloon and its contents ... is what the United States is undertaking on its own. We’re not part of that.”
Hours after Anand spoke, National Security Council co-ordinator John Kirby confirmed a second incident with an as-yet-unknown object “the size of a small car” that President Joe Biden ordered shot down Friday in the skies off the Alaska coastline.
“I can tell you it was an object that was at 40,000 feet” that did not appear to have the ability to manoeuvre, Kirby told the White House briefing, adding it was deemed a threat to civilian aircraft at that altitude.
It’s not yet clear if the latest incursion, which Kirby said ended “near the Canadian border” and was first detected Thursday night, involved a “surveillance asset,” as was the case with the balloon last week, he added.
“I’m not ruling anything in or out,” he said.
In his meeting with Anand, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made specific mention of last week’s balloon as he cited the value of Norad and the importance of the ongoing binational effort to upgrade a system that experts say is desperately out of date.
“The United States and Canada recently worked together through Norad to track (China’s) high-altitude surveillance balloon that violated the sovereignty of both of our countries,” Austin said.
“That co-ordination underscored the importance of our efforts and the need for continued investment in Norad modernization on both sides.”
Norad commander Gen. Glen VanHerck acknowledged earlier this week that the balloon wasn’t the first of its kind to enter U.S. airspace, and that previous events went undetected, exposing a “domain awareness gap” that needs closing.
Anand has said there’s no evidence any of those prior incursions involved Canadian airspace.
“I think we’re going to continue to learn a lot about how these things are or can be detected,” Kirby said. “We expect to learn a lot about our own systems, our own processes, for detection and tracking.”
