Canada Must Rearm

Since Prime Minister Stephen Harper sank our military spending below 1% of GDP for the first time since the Second World War in his last full year in office, we have been slowly trying to recover to our NATO 2% commitment. In the current environment, we probably cannot stop at 2%. In a time when we can neither count on — nor even trust — the United States, we must rebuild our domestic defence industry, and we must rearm.

With the Russian (and now therefore American) objective of destroying NATO, we must be prepared for narrower agreements with the United States like NORAD and Five-Eyes to be at risk, and we must be wary of the American response to an invocation of Article 5 by any other member of the NATO alliance.

NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, is a joint military venture between the United States and Canada monitoring our airspace and seaborne approaches for foreign incursions and threats. If an unidentified aircraft enters what’s called the Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ), it is the job of NORAD to dispatch combat aircraft to go investigate and see whether the aircraft is a foreign military aircraft or otherwise a threat to our national sovereignty. The ADIZ stretches around the perimeter of North America including the entire Arctic archipelago and is divided into Canadian and American sectors depending on which country’s airspace is nearer.

Canada and Alaska ADIZ depiction as per Nav Canada.

In practice, NORAD is busy in the ADIZ. On July 24th of last year, for example, two Russian and two Chinese military aircraft were intercepted and identified in the Alaska ADIZ. The year before, an American F-22 stealth fighter shot down a balloon over the Yukon. As the linked press releases from both incidents note, fighter jets from the United States and Canada were jointly involved in each other’s airspace.

With the current US President unapologetically doing Russia’s bidding, what will happen the next time Russian aircraft enter Canada’s Arctic Air Defence Identification Zone? NORAD is currently led by an American general, with the number two being a Canadian general. This gives direct power to the American commander-in-chief to prevent a NORAD-led intercept of foreign aircraft in Canada’s ADIZ by the Canadian military by so ordering his general. In other words, Trump can directly interfere with Canada’s Arctic sovereignty to the benefit of Russia, and that at will.

We are, then, at risk of Trump obstructing NORAD from defending Canadian airspace at a most unexpected and inconvenient moment, allowing Russian aircraft into North American airspace via Canada’s ADIZ, delaying our response, and then blaming us for the failure to intercept and react as a pretext for more dramatic action against our country.

If this seems like a far-fetched concern, consider that, on Friday, while Trump was bullying Zelenskyy on Putin’s behalf in the Oval Office, his administration stood down all US Cyber Command defensive and offensive operations against Russia:

March 2, 2025

It is hard to come to grips with the fact that the United States can no longer be trusted to be Canada’s military ally after the relationship we have built over generations, but it is a reality we must confront.

Trump wants Canada to become the 51st state because he wants our resources and figures, not completely incorrectly, that Canada’s defence and therefore sovereignty is disproportionately dependent on the good will and military resources of the United States. There is no longer a view in the United States administration that Canada and the US have common interests worth defending as partners, but that everything must be done on a transactional, even subservient, basis.

NATO, like the NORAD subset, is in existential danger. There is no guarantee, indeed even little likelihood, that if an Eastern European member of NATO were to be attacked by Russia tomorrow that Trump would respect the invocation of Article 5 by that country, required by treaty, and commit his armed forces to defend these nominal allies. Trump doesn’t even follow treaties he himself signed, so there’s little basis on which to believe he’d follow ones signed when he was in diapers.

American promises are no longer worth the paper on which they are printed.

The United States is free to do what it wishes, of course. The American people voted overwhelmingly with their couches, with more staying home than voting for Trump. Those who do not vote, in any democracy, are expressly deferring to the judgment of those who do. On that basis, while less than one-third of American electors directly voted for Trump, a whopping roughly 67% were ok with him being in the White House.

But so, too, is Canada free to do what we need to do. France has, since the First World War, built their own weapons. They’re now the world’s second largest exporter of military hardware, with a massive domestic industry. The economic output of their enormous military investment stays within their own economy. The entire country fits in the province of Quebec alone two and a half times and their natural resources are comparatively limited.

There is, then, nothing stopping Canada from building up our own domestic defence industry to be the primary provider of hardware to our own armed forces, even or especially on big ticket items like aircraft and submarines. It is imperative that we break our dependence on the United States for our weapons and our day-to-day defence. With President Trump doing the bidding of the Russian Federation, we simply cannot trust the United States at this time. We cannot rely on US-provided weapons to be available, nor to work as advertised in a conflict in which the United States is not necessarily our ally. Indeed, the Americans, seeking to make Canada the 51st state, could well be the adversary.

To defend ourselves, we need to strengthen our alliances with our NATO partners other than the United States as well as non-NATO democracies, and we need to build out and build up our own military hardware and personnel to the level of a war footing, not to meet Trump’s demands — but to meet Trump’s threats.

If we are to assert and defend our sovereignty, it requires us to have the physical ability to do so, and time is of the essence.