Securing the Continental Skies

Air defence — the art and science of knowing when enemy aircraft have entered your airspace, and what to do about it — might seem like a relatively simple problem. Yet, as Matthew Paul Trudgen explains, Canada-United States co-operation in this realm has been anything but straightforward. In this detailed and impressive study, Trudgen traces the diplomatic, strategic and political forces that led, ultimately, to the establishment of a bilateral command, NORAD (first, North American Air Defense Command, now known as North American Aerospace Defense Command). 

This is an academic history that makes no sacrifice of detail for simplicity. Indeed, for Trudgen, the complexity of the evolution of air defence co-operation is the point. The development of this co-operation between Canada and the United States was shaped by a swirl of international events and crises, technological development and change, shifting priorities in Ottawa and Washington, D.C., and — perhaps most important — the delicate negotiations between a superpower and a much less powerful neighbour with sovereignty sensitivities. Thoughtfully, Trudgen includes an introduction that points to these themes, which helps the reader see order in the detail in the narrative chapters. 

Trudgen begins his study in the immediate post-Second World War years and considers early, relatively minor co-operative projects like weather stations. While small projects, they were still enough to worry Canadian officials that American projects and personnel in Canada would pose a threat to Canadian sovereignty. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, for example, told cabinet that “the long-range policy of the Americans [is] to absorb Canada” and that their military projects in Canada were a conscious part of this effort. Trudgen is right to dismiss King’s belief that the Americans were, at the time, trying to dominate Canada. Yet, there is ample evidence that much of Canadian air defence policy was shaped by wariness, if not of American intentions, then of the consequences of an American presence in Canada.