Shock, retired NORAD deputy commander defends NORAD!

Former Canadian NORAD Deputy Commander, Christopher Coates, has come out swinging in defence of NORAD and in denial of arguments I advanced in a recent essay published in The Walrus. You can read the Walrus essay here:

https://thewalrus.ca/why-canada-needs-to-walk-away-from-norad/

Coates, now retired and serving as a defence expert for the conservative MacDonald -Laurier Institute, was given space in the National Post for an opinion piece attacking what I wrote. You can read him here:

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/christopher-coates-canada-should-double-down-on-norad-not-walk-away

I suspect his views represent a strong chunk of opinion among retired Canadian air force officers.

My Walrus piece was designed to encourage new thinking about the future of NORAD, not to recycle the old.

I’ll let you judge the combatting pieces if you wish, but I will just say that, in my view, it is critical that Canadians take seriously the kind of defence dependency on the U.S. that is at the heart of NORAD. Coates believes that more Canadian commitment to NORAD will generate more Canadian influence on US defence policy. That is a longstanding aspiration at the heart of Canadian military thinking about NORAD, that has never been borne out and won’t be in the future. In that vein, Coates has also written expressing strong support for Trump’s “golden dome” missile defence system.

Canada has a responsibility to assume control over monitoring and defence of our own air space, and not rely on the old NORAD construct. This does not mean, as I point out in the Walrus article, that we cannot continue to engage in early-warning and intelligence sharing with the U.S., as well as defence R & D. These forms of cooperation would be in the interests of both countries.

I don’t think, despite what Coates’ suggests, that Canada “should lean on NATO and Europe for Canada’s defences.” What I did try to argue is that Canada should lean on itself and orient our collective security more broadly to the NATO alliance.

Coates accuses me of writing a “poorly disguised attempt to stroke [did he mean “stoke’] anti-Americanism; an attempt to poke the Trump administration for a perceived ‘attack’ on Canada and comes from a myopic interpretation of U.S. intentions. “

Let’s see. What did I actually say about the U.S. and the Trump administration? I said “we have entered an age when Canada and the US are diverging in terms of political, economic and foreign policy.” Coates is welcome to dispute this, but dispute it, don’t engage in ad hominem attacks. What did I say about the Trump administration?—nothing beyond pointing to its 2025 National Security Strategy and mentioning US annexationist threats to Canada and to Greenland. There is nothing “myopic” about paying attention to what the Trump administration says in its National Security Strategy or the threats that Trump makes. Coates seems to be in denial about all that.

I claim no crystal ball on U.S. intentions. But I am with the PM in agreeing that nostalgia is not a strategy.

Let’s have the NORAD debate. I am with Coates on this—let it be based on facts (and analysis). But it can’t be anchored in thinking from the past and an assumption that nothing has changed in the world, or south of our border.