Canadian, U.S. defence ministers highlight aid to Ukraine, but mum on Norad’s future

Defence Minister Anita Anand's first official visit to the Pentagon to meet with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also saw few details on next steps to support Ukraine.

Defence Minister Anita Anand’s first official visit to the Pentagon proved long on familiar diplomatic bromides Thursday, but offered little public-facing progress on urgent North American military priorities like the war in Ukraine or upgrading a badly outdated continental defence system.

Anand’s arrival — complete with a colour guard, marching-band renditions of the national anthems and a personal greeting from U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin — underlined the urgent nature of the geopolitical pressures reshaping the world from eastern Europe.

But the hour-long meeting and subsequent 20-minute news conference gave no substantive clues about Canada’s next steps on supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia or the pressing need to modernize Norad, the shared early-warning defence network that’s badly showing its age.

The closest Anand came was to confirm that Canadians are helping to train their Ukrainian counterparts on the hulking M777 cannons Canada delivered to the fight last week. Both she and Austin also made a point of mentioning the eight armoured vehicles that are due in the coming days.

Anand did not say where the training is happening. Defence sources say Canadian troops are not in Ukraine but working in a third country in eastern Europe.

The sources, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, say Canada has sent four of the guns — fixtures of Canada’s 10-year war in Afghanistan that can lob shells as far as 30 kilometres — from 1 Royal Canadian Horse Artillery in Shilo, Man.

Anand also cited the more than $8 billion in military spending over the next five years that Canada promised in the federal budget earlier this month.

But on the question of modernizing Norad in the face of an ambitious aggressor in Vladimir Putin and the mounting threat of high-tech long-range missile attacks from Russia and China, Anand said only that “we will have more to say on this in the short term.”