Canada spending almost $5B to upgrade continental defence, Anand says

Canada will spend $4.9 billion over the next six years to modernize continental defence, Defence Minister Anita Anand said Monday.

Anand delivered the long-awaited announcement on the upgrade of NORAD at the Canadian military's principal air base at Trenton, Ont.

The figure represents Canada's share of the cost of overhauling the decades-old joint bi-national air defence command, which was originally designed to watch out for Soviet bombers. The project was not part of the Liberal government's 2017 defence policy document.

The United States covers about 60 per cent of the bill for NORAD.

The nature of NORAD has changed in recent years as it has assumed additional responsibilities for monitoring sealane approaches to North America and guarding against cyberattacks.

The NORAD overhaul will include the replacement of the North Warning System, a chain of radar stations in the Far North. The system eventually will be replaced with two different types of radar systems — one northern, one polar — that have the ability to look over the horizon.

The overhaul also will deploy new satellites built to track moving targets on the ground and a top-secret series of remote sensors.

The new network will monitor not only the Arctic — NORAD's traditional domain — but also Pacific and Atlantic approaches to the continent.

Military experts have long warned that NORAD's current surveillance system is not built to track cruise missiles — weapons fired from submarines or from outside of North American airspace. It's also not set up to deal with hypersonic missiles, which travel at many times the speed of sound.

Both weapons systems have featured prominently in Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"The threat environment has changed," Anand said, answering a reporter's question on Monday.