“Hemispheric Control”: Competition and Collaboration in Arctic Aerospace

While not unanticipated, Mark Carney’s prompt $6 billion investment in Over-the-Horizon Radar represents an act of strategic initiative in Arctic security. Amid increasing Russian and Chinese activity in the region—and US rhetoric challenging Canadian sovereignty—this move represents the assertion of national agency through strategic and timely defence procurement.

Earlier this year, NORAD fighter jets scrambled to patrol Russian aircraft along Canada’s northern frontier. During the summer of 2024, China and Russia held joint bomber exercises near Alaska. These threats and others like them have stressed the urgent need to assert Canadian sovereignty in the region.

During a March 18 visit to Iqaluit, less than a week into his tenure, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Canada will invest $6 billion in Over-the-Horizon Radar (OTHR) capabilities to support Arctic surveillance and defence. While this early Prime Ministerial visit to the Canadian Arctic was symbolically important, the investment was not new and was considered by some experts as ineffectual in bolstering Canada’s presence in the Far North. The allocation for OTHR, by far the largest investment announced during the visit, had been conceptualized nearly three years prior in a $38.6 billion plan to modernize NORAD. Moreover, the installation itself will be housed in Southern Ontario, not in the Arctic.

The Prime Minister’s decision also rankled domestic competitors by outsourcing the contract to Australian and British firms. Nearly five decades of state-backed research and development stand behind Australia’s OTHR industry, compared to D-TA Systems in Ottawa who have been working with the technology since 2011. Carney’s speech articulated his government’s priorities—leveraging the best expertise, foreign or domestic, to address pressing security risks, without waiting on domestic capacity.

Timeliness should indeed be a priority in securing Canadian ownership over assets that benefit collective North American security goals. In recent months, strategic competition between the United States and Canada has emerged as a key consideration in the Arctic. According to Steve Bannon, MAGA ideologue and former White House strategist, the Canadian Arctic represents the continent’s soft underbelly, a view corroborated by Trump’s own rhetoric. Canada is seen as a weak partner, its independence a barrier to US-led “hemispheric control”. This paradigm discounts the decades’ long binational cooperation that had existed through NORAD.

Despite an openly bellicose US executive, joint exercises between Canada and the US have not halted. Operation NANOOK, which concluded earlier this month, saw 650 personnel from six countries, including the US, participate in military exercises in the Canadian Arctic. NORAD, too, continues to serve as a forum for US-Canadian collaboration in aerospace defence. The organization’s commander, Gen. Gregory Guillot, commented that Canada could play a role in realizing Trump’s “Golden Dome”, and that relevant plans will be reviewed by Congress and the Canadian parliament.

However, President Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy means Arctic actors, like Canada, cannot afford to be complacent. To avoid figuring as an object of US strategic priorities, Canada ought to take steps in asserting its agency and capabilities in the region. The procurement by the federal government of state-of-the-art radar, ahead of the US and on its own initiative, is just one such step.