NDDN meeting 6 · 2025-10-07 — Committee Evidence — LegisWatch

Summary

This House of Commons National Defence committee meeting was held to study the modernization of NORAD. The witnesses were Jean-Pierre Hickey, Associate Professor; Robert Huebert, Professor at the Centre for Military Security and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary; Jessica M. Shadian, President and Chief Executive Officer, Arctic 360; Richard Shimooka, Senior Fellow, Macdonald-Laurier Institute; and Madeleine Redfern, Chief Operating Officer, CanArctic Inuit Networks Inc.

Professor Hickey testified that Canada lacks the infrastructure and expertise to understand and defend against hypersonic weapons, which are already being used by adversaries and pose a serious challenge to Arctic defence. He recommended a coordinated national hypersonic strategy under the NORAD modernization plan, including establishing university-based facilities and a national test facility at DRDC Valcartier, to train personnel and enable collaboration with industry and allies.

Professor Huebert argued that the geopolitical and technological landscape has fundamentally changed, making nuclear deterrence a war-fighting necessity that requires Canada to demonstrate it can detect and respond to new delivery systems. He stressed that NORAD modernization is an existential issue and that Canada must show it is serious by making decisions quickly, acquiring the F-35, and ensuring the Prime Minister is prepared to make rapid decisions in a crisis.

Dr. Shadian focused on the need for a strategic national vision for Arctic infrastructure, arguing that NORAD modernization cannot be separated from a broader investment strategy for energy, digital, and transportation systems. She recommended that Canada develop cold-weather technology leadership, consider defence co-operation with Greenland and Denmark, and ensure data sovereignty, noting that reliance on foreign satellite networks for northern communications is a risk.

Mr. Shimooka stated that Canada’s contribution to NORAD is highly limited due to aging capabilities and slow procurement, and that the U.S. frustration over this is a core impediment to the bilateral relationship. He recommended Canada become more proactive, complementing U.S. plans like the "golden dome" where they have deficiencies, and warned that delays on the F-35 are particularly harmful given the need for aerial defence in the north.

Ms. Redfern emphasized that Canada lacks all-domain awareness from seabed to space, particularly in the marine environment, and that fibre optic networks, strategic ground stations, and energy solutions like small modular reactors are critical. She noted that Canada is not ready for any type of incursion in the Arctic and that procurement is a security risk due to its slowness and lack of trained personnel.

On the question of whether Canada should buy the F-35, Mr. Shimooka, Professor Huebert, and Ms. Redfern said yes, while Dr. Shadian conditioned her support on not being wholly reliant on the United States. Professor Hickey said he was not qualified to answer.

AI-generated summary — may contain errors; verify against the official evidence.

Witnesses · 5

Jean-Pierre Hickey

Associate Professor, As an Individual

Opening remarks

Thank you, Chair and committee members, for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Jean-Pierre Hickey. I am a professor at the University of Waterloo in mechanical and mechatronics engineering, specializing in hypersonic aerodynamics and propulsion. Through NATO working groups, government and industry collaborations, my research advances hypersonic technologies. It's a dual-use area that touches civilian space and also defence applications. Today, I want to emphasize the need for a coordinated national effort under the NORAD modernization plan to build hypersonic expertise and infrastructure in Canada. Doing so will strengthen our defence capabilities, but also synergize Canadian industry. Hypersonic weapons are no longer a theoretical threat. They are already being used in Ukraine. Russia’s Avangard glider can reach North America. Both China and Russia have hundreds of operational hypersonic weapons. Like traditional ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons can travel up to and beyond Mach 10, which is two to three kilometres per second, but they do so while manoeuvring unpredictably at low altitude. They are difficult to track, difficult to intercept, and they compress…

Full testimony ↗

Robert Huebert

Professor, Centre for Military Security and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary, As an Individual

Opening remarks

Thank you very much. As the chair said, my name is Rob Huebert. I'm a professor at the University of Calgary, but I'm also the director of the Centre for Military Security and Strategic Studies. The focus of my five minutes is to introduce the concept of why we are actually doing NORAD modernization and how serious it is for Canada. We are seeing, since approximately 2002, efforts that have redeveloped the nuclear deterrent system. We, of course, have had the narrative that there was a peace dividend, that in fact the use of force, more or less, had been eliminated at the end of the Cold War. But if we look very closely at the developments particularly of our enemies, Russia and China, and also in terms of our ally, the United States, we will see—and it follows very closely to some of the issues that Professor Hickey just raised—that the technologies of the delivery system of nuclear weapons have fundamentally changed this balance. Canada now faces an existential threat to the possibility of becoming engaged in a nuclear war if, in fact, a deterrent system is not maintained. What we have to understand is that the new geopolitical transformations that have been occurring since…