Canada _ (Commonwealth Union) _ Among all the suspicion and intrigue surrounding the Chinese surveillance balloon are concerns about the time it was flying in Canadian territory. According to US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the balloon was originally spotted above Alaska on January 28 before flying into the Yukon and British Columbia’s interior before returning to American airspace over Montana. Why didn’t Canada respond sooner, why didn’t we shoot it down ourselves, and if Canada’s military was even capable of doing so. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is in charge of aerospace warning, control, and marine warning.
According to retired major general Scott Clancy, who was deputy commander of the Alaskan NORAD Region at one time, while each country has sovereignty over its airspace, “NORAD is commanded by both Canada and the United States. It is not either/or.” He stated that any decision to operate within Canadian airspace would be made by the Canadian government, and that the NORAD agreement makes NORAD an executor of that decision.
In this situation, Clancy claims that as soon as the balloon was detected above Alaska, the head of NORAD would notify “the hierarchies political and military of both governments in the United States and Canada simultaneously.”And the choice on how to respond, he said, would be a “balancing between intelligence, operational security, and public safety.”
NORAD commander U.S. Gen. Glen VanHerck stated that some action was taken when the balloon was over Canada. Both Clancy, the retired NORAD deputy commander, and Bercuson believe that after the balloon was determined to represent no tactical threat to persons on the ground, it provided a chance for Canadians and Americans to acquire critical intelligence. Bercuson concurred, stating that China wasn’t only interested in making sure the North Americans saw the balloon; it also wanted to know how they reacted to seeing it. VanHerck did confess in his statements Monday that this was not the first time a surveillance balloon has flown over North America, and that similar balloons had previously avoided detection by North America’s old early warning system due to a “domain awareness gap” that has since been filled
