Kicking Canada out of Five Eyes and NORAD?

The credibility of Trump’s threats toward Canada took a hit last week, but intelligence and defence could be different.

On 7 March, The New York Times reported on a 3 February conversation between the American Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and Canada’s finance minister, Dominic Leblanc. During the call, Lutnick reportedly warned Leblanc that President Donald Trump was considering removing Canada from the Five Eyes intelligence sharing compact. Lutnick also reportedly told Leblanc that the President was reviewing the binational North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD).

How seriously should the Canadian government take these threats? It’s hard to say. To be honest, the answer shifts day to day, week to week. At times, it looks like President Trump is scoping out our weak points. At other times, the Trump administration appears so inept and inconsistent that it comes across as bluster and stupidity.

Given the stakes involved, it’s wise to assume that Trump may make good on some of his threats, however self-defeating they may be. That’s arguably how we should approach Lutnick’s comments about Five Eyes and NORAD.

Let’s first review why it’s so hard to figure out Trump’s intentions toward Canada.

When President Trump issued his initial tariff deadline, Canadians weren’t sure what to make of it. After the first 30-day reprieve was announced, there seemed to be a glimmer of hope that the tariffs could be avoided. Following Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine and rapprochement with Putin, Canada’s anxieties climbed --as they did among all of America’s (past?) allies. And when it became clear that the President was moving forward with tariffs on Canada, the Prime Minister was far more direct about the Trump’s motives. In Prime Minister Trudeau’s words: “What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”

Then the follies started. Within days of imposing a blanket 25% tariff on Canada, the Trump administration started talking about a compromise. Lutnick, in particular, mused about Canada and the United States “meeting in the middle.” Next, the auto industry was spared. After that, the tariffs were paused on all goods that comply with the USMCA. The President then threatened a 250% tariff on Canadian dairy. As Canada’s foreign minister put it, the whole episode was a psychodrama.

The Donald discourse has shifted in Canada after this series of 180s. Canadians are increasingly exasperated. As Gurney and Gerson discussed on The Line podcast, the Canadian attitude is tantamount to “Fine. See you in hell.” Over on the Mansbridge show, Hébert observed that Canadians have been primed for pain and a fight, whereas Americans haven’t. The hunch that Trump and his people didn’t think any of this through appears increasingly plausible. His position is weaker than it appears and Canada’s plan to keep pressure on American consumers is working.

We need to be cautious, though. Trump has only been in office for a month and a half. We’ve still got nearly four years to go. Perhaps most importantly, if Trump is forced to back down on tariffs, he may turn to other ways of punishing Canada.

Whether out of spite or as part of a wholesale reorientation of American foreign policy, the President could begin tearing up security and defence agreements. Americans wouldn’t be immediately affected if he did. Industry and the markets might not like it, but they wouldn’t react as negatively as they have toward his economic chicanery.

It’s important note that, during her appearance on Althia Raj’s podcast, foreign minister Mélanie Joly stated that Secretary of State Marco Rubio reassured her that NORAD was safe. Besides Rubio, many American military leaders and intelligence officials would tell the administration that they’d be nuts to undermine security and defence cooperation with the United States’ northern neighbour. Yet that kind of thinking seems to goad the President on. The more evidence there is against something and the more resistance there is, the more he seems to want to do it.

Like his abandonment of Ukraine, moreover, the average American might be puzzled if Trump went after our security and defence agreements, but it wouldn’t garner that much attention. If it did make the news, Trump could sell it as the United States no longer paying for Canada’s security and defence. Rubio’s reassurance is our most reliable data point at this stage, but there are still reasons to worry. We can’t rule out the possibility that Trump could stop sharing American intelligence with Canada or withdraw from the NORAD agreement. It may not be likely, but the Canadian intelligence and defence communities should start thinking about how they’d adjust.

When it comes to the Five Eyes and intelligence sharing, a lot depends on how far the Trump administration would go. We might be cut off from certain types of intelligence or it might be a wider denial. The other three eyes, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom would still be able to share intelligence with us, but the United States would probably tell them that no intelligence they have from the United States could be transmitted to Canada. If things got really heated, the United States could threaten to cut off the other three eyes if they share their own intelligence with us. That seems highly unlikely, but who knows?

Canada would have access to far less intelligence if the United States stopped sharing any with us. We’re a net consumer of intelligence, and a hell of a lot comes from them. And while the other three eyes could help us out, the reality is that the Canadian government works with a lot of two-eyed Canada-US classified information. It would be quite disruptive to many standard practices and operations for the Americans to suddenly pull out of those arrangements. Indeed, things would get even more complicated if the United States also cut us off from data and networks that our military depends on to operate and communicate.

How should Canada prepare for this scenario? Above all, we should be working with Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom to salvage what we can if the United States uses intelligence sharing as leverage or if Washington fully pivots toward the Kremlin. We should also be looking to build new intelligence relationships with European and Asian allies. I understand that we’re starting to do that, thankfully.

Canada would also need to invest more in its existing intelligence services and stop dithering about whether we should establish our own foreign human intelligence service. I get that a foreign human intelligence service is one of those things that the Canadian population would supposedly refuse to accept, like ballistic missile defence. Frankly, I suspect the only people who would be worried are those who have ‘I love the CBC’ and ‘I support public health care’ lawn signs. You know, the pensioned-up boomers who send angry emails when you write op-eds they don’t like.

There’d also be resistance from parts of CSIS, since they’d worry that we have more pressing security intelligence concerns and that we lack the maturity to collect foreign human intelligence. I dunno. If Australia, Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom can run a foreign human intelligence service, we could hack it given enough time, money, and training. We wouldn’t want it to be a massive endeavour, but it would help us fill some gaps if the United States cuts us off or shares far less over the long term.[i] Even if the Trump administration gave its head a shake and kept our intelligence sharing relationships intact, it wouldn’t be a bad thing for Canada to have greater intelligence gathering autonomy.

What about a termination of the NORAD agreement? Trump would probably want to make a show of it, locking Canadian officers out of the headquarters in Colorado Springs. Geography, however, would necessitate the continuation of some form of continental defence cooperation. Instead of a shared binational headquarters, we’d probably have close cooperation between Northern Command at Colorado Springs and what is currently the Canadian NORAD Region headquartered at 1 Canadian Air Division, Winnipeg. A NORAD commander would no longer have operational control of both American and Canadian air defence forces, and arrangements would need to be made to allow these forces to operate in each other’s airspace, refuel each other’s fighters, and share data from the radars and sensors we’re modernizing, but it would function. Canada would lose its role in NORAD’s ballistic missile early warning, too, which would complicate a possible extension of the United States’ ballistic missile defence system. It would be less efficient and effective, and it would terminate the clearest symbol of North American defence cooperation, but we’d carry on.

Things would be far dicier if the United States stopped intercepting Russian aircraft nearing North American airspace. We’d have to do so on our own for Canadian airspace. More troublingly, we’d soon be doing so with new CF-35s.

Having failed to convince the government to buy Super Hornets or a European fighter, Canada’s F-35 skeptics are back, warning that the aircraft will be vulnerable to American interference. If reports are correct, the United States is messing with Ukraine’s F-16s, highlighting that the concern here is more than a fever dream. We can’t discount the possibility that the United States could do something similar to us or dangle the possibility to, again, exert leverage or coerce. Point taken.

The problem, however, is that this issue extends well beyond the F-35. As noted above, the Canadian military operates many platforms, weapons, and wider capabilities that depend on American data, parts, networks, and permissions. If the United States wanted to, it could hobble large parts of the CAF. Since we’ve already spent billions on a good deal of new equipment that has these types of vulnerabilities, and given that we’d need to spend many billions and many more years getting European or Asian replacements, we’re kinda stuck –at least for the next two decades.

Indeed, even if we decided to sole-source a bunch of capabilities from the Europeans right now, many of their production lines will be busy rearming Europe! The best we can do is start buying back-up capabilities from Europe and Asia where we can, and use our forthcoming submarine, tank, and AEW acquisitions to cement relationships with allies other than the United States.

I’ll end on a positive note. Despite all the fears surrounding the F-35 and our other American-made capabilities, we have a trump card (yuk, yuk). If the President mucks around with systems that Canada bought or is buying from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc, these big companies will panic. Their sales to the rest of the world will be in jeopardy if other allies worry that they’ll be next. We’re talking big money here and a ton of American jobs. Consequently, this threat looks a lot more like Trump’s tariffs. He may really want to do it, but the domestic blow back would probably make him reverse course within days.

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[i] We could get this foreign human intelligence service going relatively quickly. It could initially be set up by prerogative Order-in-Council. We could place this embryonic agency under the responsibility of the Minister of National Defence. CSE is under the defence minister’s responsibility, as are the defence intelligence activities of the Department of National Defence and Canadian Armed Forces. Since CSE and defence intelligence conduct most of our intelligence gathering outside of Canada, and the defence minister already issues intelligence directions to these entities, it would be a better fit than the Minister of Public Safety or Minister of Foreign Affairs. Many foreign human intelligence agencies, moreover, started under defence establishments, and many still reside there today. Once it was ready, we could legislate for this nascent service and figure out where best to put it and what authorities it should have beyond the limited scope of the prerogative.