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Why Canada Needs to Walk Away from NORAD
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.
Key points- 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 was—and is—a unique “binational” arrangement that altered the usual sovereign control of armed forces. Canadian officers could command US air assets from a NORAD headquarters, and American officers could do the same for Canadian units. Each operated in the territory of the other, with constant joint exercises and planning. After the September 11 attacks, NORAD expanded its role to include domestic air patrols and monitoring maritime approaches against terrorist threats. Later, the US pursued missile-defence systems against rogue states, but Canada declined to participate in 2005, leaving interception to the US alone. (A House of Dynamite got it right).
This defence pact created a powerful dynamo that drives many elements of Canadian security policy—closer defence integration with the US, dependency on major US military manufacturers, a mind-meld between Canadian and US military planners and air forces, Canadian defence strategy tied to US initiatives. We’ve embarked on a modernization of its infrastructure. The old Distant Early Warning line—a vast network of early warning radar stations stretching into the Arctic—is now called the North Warning System and is being rebuilt. Canada has also committed to a new capability to extend the warning net: an “Over-the-Horizon”(OTH) radar system, its antennae to be situated on southern Ontario farmland.
The NORAD conundrum is that what was once good for Canada’s interests, generated by a threat picture that prevailed for much of the Cold War, now threatens to erode both our sovereignty and security. We have entered an age when Canada and the US are diverging in terms of political, economic, and foreign policies.
The US National Security Strategy, released in November 2025, puts a marked emphasis on Western hemispheric dominance in the unilateral interest of the US. Most alarming, given the geographic proximity to Canada and shared interests between Canada and Greenland, are US annexationist threats and demands on Greenland, including for new basing rights that might erode the sovereignty of Greenland as a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization founding member. The US National Security Strategy is a doctrine that legitimizes the US exercise of force, without the agreement or compliance of traditional allies.
A radical revisioning of NORAD is needed. The threat picture has changed dramatically over the agreement’s history, from the 1950s to the post 9/11 period. The terrorist danger has shape-shifted. Our relations with the US have also been fundamentally destabilized by the Trump administration. We can’t simply go on with a defence policy based on an old assumption of the value, and continuing tightening, of close defence integration. The NORAD defence pact has been renewed nine times since 1957. The last renewal was in May 2006, at which point, it was decided that fixed intervals for review and renewal were no longer needed.
It’s now needed. Canadian strategic interest in NORAD must be redefined, with a new emphasis on sovereign Canadian capabilities and needs and a new strategic framework for collective security centred more on our NATO alliance. What of the old NORAD can be jettisoned?
Let’s start with the manned bomber threat, the original fear that led to NORAD. If war ever broke out, giant, nuke-carrying, four-engined turboprops code-named “Bear” were expected to come over the pole, cross Canadian air space, and strike at continental targets, mostly US. The arrival of intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 1960s changed all that.
It’s true: an aggressive, imperialist, revanchist Russia is back, helmed by an ex-KGB apparatchik—Vladimir Putin. The bomber threat, however, is not. The Russian bomber force has shrunk considerably and has suffered significant losses from Ukrainian drone attacks.
But if the old threat—waves of bombers coming over the pole—is no longer the real danger, what about the new threat posed by hypersonic cruise missiles? They operate very differently from ballistic missiles. ICBMs use rocket engines to boost into the upper atmosphere, then ascend higher once the engines are stopped, then descend and detach one or more warheads on a target. Cruise missiles are “air-breathers”—they use jet engines and can fly fast and very low over terrain. They are manoeuvrable, guided by various navigation systems.
Russia has deployed a hypersonic cruise missile, the Kinzhal, in the Ukraine war. It is a stand-off weapon, meaning launched from afar. The Kinzhal has a range of between 1,500–2,000 kilometres, possibly extended to 3,000 kilometres. Although the Russian missile was designed primarily for European war scenarios, it could be used, in some imagined war, to target North America. The launch platforms could be Russian bombers, jet fighters, submarines, or surface warships. None would need to venture anywhere near Canadian territory to unleash their payloads.
The new threats don’t end with new missiles. They include long-range attack drones and hybrid warfare techniques: cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, sabotage operations, disinformation campaigns, foreign interference. Defending against all that requires capabilities that Canada largely lacks and that the US cannot simply provide on our behalf. The alliance best suited to that challenge is not a continental command designed in the 1950s but NATO, whose members have accumulated hard-earned experience confronting the Russian-driven hybrid tactics now reshaping conflict.
The logical consequence is a broader conception of collective security. Rather than centring Canadian defence policy on NORAD alone, Canada should anchor itself more firmly within NATO’s emerging Arctic and Euro-Atlantic mission. This broader theatre, rooted in the Article Five commitment of one for all and all for one, would operate across a wider region stretching from North America, the Arctic, the North Atlantic to Europe itself.
NATO would have to be on board with this, but the signs are encouraging, especially the security interests promoted by NATO’s five European Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland). This new outlook has some immediate consequences for decision making, including what fighter jet makes the best fit for Canadian requirements; what early warning aircraft does the same; how we build out an early warning radar system; what kinds of surveillance and early warning platforms we put into space; how much greater capacity we need for foreign intelligence collection and analysis to understand threats; how much money we put into military research and development; how we partner with industry and academia on the development of new counter-measures.
But there is always the elephant in the room of Canadian defence policy. How would the US look at a Canadian effort to shift emphasis in aerospace defence away from NORAD and toward NATO? Would they see nothing but a dangerously weakening Canadian contribution to the defence of North America? Would we face threats, of the sort made by the US ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, when he told CBC News that if the Canadian government doesn’t buy the full complement of US-made F-35 fighter jets for NORAD purposes, US fighter jets might have to operate more in Canadian airspace.
Already there are warning signs. The US Department of War (formally the defence department) recently announced a pause to the working of the Permanent Joint Board of Defense (PJBD), a high-level planning body that predates NORAD, signed in 1940 by then Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King and then US president Franklin D. Roosevelt. The PJDB was designed to be, as its official description has it, “a senior advisory body on continental security for Canada and the United States and forum for Canadian and American diplomatic and military leaders to handle politically sensitive matters.”
Its deliberations once shaped the creation of NORAD. When Elbridge Colby, a senior Pentagon official, announced the suspension on X on a Monday morning, he included a link to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech. The speech has irked the Trump administration, who see it (justly) as an attack on US policies. It has also opened a path for a charge that the Canadian government is too prone to empty rhetorical flourishes.
Less clear is Colby’s attack on Canadian defence commitments, in which he argued that Canada is not doing enough and has not laid out, to satisfy American eyes, a clear plan for long-term defence spending. This comes as Canada is embarked on one of the greatest military modernization programs in its history.
Closing shop on the PJBD does not spell the end of NORAD, but it’s a potent signal that the US could itself decide to walk away from the continental defence pact or apply inordinate pressure on Canada to conform to US defence demands and outlooks if it doesn’t like the shape of Canadian commitments.
Against such tides, what is left for Canada but to show our willingness to partner with the US on Canadian terms and wait for US reason and calculations of self-interest to kick in? A managed divorce. Messy, drawn-out, but doable.
Even if Canada were to shift toward greater sovereign defence capabilities within a NATO framework and move beyond NORAD as the organizing principle of continental defence, the Canada–US defence relationship would not disappear. Nor should it.
A core element of the original NORAD mission—shared early warning of attacks on North America—would remain essential. Indeed, it could be strengthened through new Canadian capabilities on land, at sea, in the air, and in space. The same is true of defence intelligence co-operation, which could continue and even deepen as Canada expands its own intelligence-gathering capacities. The difference would be that the relationship would no longer rest primarily on the familiar asymmetry between a superpower and a dependent middle power. Instead, it would be grounded in a more balanced partnership, with Canada contributing more capabilities of its own.
Whether the US would find this acceptable would be a question mark. The US might not wish to lose its dominant defence role vis-à-vis Canada, might not trust NATO with any kind of collective security mission for North American aerospace defence even if couched as an Arctic and North Atlantic security mission, and could consider abandoning NATO altogether. The Trump administration is increasingly focused on a made-in-America hegemonic policy and a “Fortress America” approach.
But the intended outcomes—a stronger, more self-reliant Canada; an enhanced role for NATO; deeper early warning and defence intelligence sharing—would be good for both Canada and the United States and a huge improvement on a fossilized arrangement. It might serve to bring the US around to a renewed respect and trust in Canada as a defence partner, while leaving the US free to exercise its own strategic deterrence mission.
Whatever happens, it’s better than waiting helplessly for the ending to A House of Dynamite.
The post Why Canada Needs to Walk Away from NORAD first appeared on The Walrus.
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