|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
 |
 |
    |
|
|
|||
 |
|
||
|
|||
|
|
|
|
||||||||
|
U.S. Election to Force Canadian Defense Decision
A second term in office for U.S. President George W. Bush is putting pressure on Canada to decide whether to join the U.S. missile defense program, the Washington Post reported yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 10). “I think this is one issue they would have liked to have skipped,” Gordon O’Connor, a Conservative Party member of Parliament, said of Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Liberal Party. Experts have said Bush is unlikely to push for a decision during a planned visit to Ottawa, which is expected before his January inauguration, according to the Post. The issue, however, has received renewed attention in Canada. “There’s an influential community that wants Canada to reassert itself as the United States’ best friend, a position we lost to the United Kingdom,” said Michael Byers, a security expert at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “There’s a desire to make up, in effect, for the refusal to go along with the Iraq war.” Missile defense supporters emphasize Canadian-U.S. cooperation in the North American Aerospace Defense Command, arguing that Canada must continue to participate in decisions pertaining to defense of the continent. “Do we want the Americans to go ahead with something to defend North America that we’re not going to participate in?” Defense Minister Bill Graham said in September. Opponents, however, have said the plan is technologically unsound, expensive and based on outdated threat assessments. “There are places we should be cooperating with the United States, but this is way down on the list,” said John Polanyi, a University of Toronto chemist and Nobel laureate. Some experts have said the internal debate in Canada is unlikely to have much effect because Washington can implement missile defense whether or not Ottawa joins. Last summer, Canada began allowing the joint U.S.-Canada NORAD operations center in Colorado to share incoming missile information with U.S. Northern Command. “From a technical perspective, Canada is already in,” said Byers. “It has made the decision to cooperate to the degree necessary to let it go forward.” (Doug Struck, Washington Post, Nov. 14).
| ||||||||||
Back to top
