The interest in balloons, other than the party and clown varieties, has recently reached levels perhaps not seen in Canada since the 19th century.
It all began, of course, with a giant Chinese surveillance balloon that floated above British Columbia before drifting around the United States and ultimately being blown up by the United States Air Force over the Atlantic. Since then, three other objects have met a similar fate including one brought down over Yukon and another shot down above Lake Huron.
[Read: A Rising Awareness That Balloons Are Everywhere in Our Skies]
As for the original, China is sticking with its story that the first balloon — which carried a payload that was the size of about three buses and festooned with antennas — is nothing more than a wayward weather balloon. But officials in the United States are equally adamant that it was soaking up electronic data as it drifted about.
On Thursday, however, President Biden suggested that maybe the other three balloons weren’t.
“We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were, but nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country,” Mr. Biden said.
[Read: Biden Tries to Calm Tensions Over Chinese Aerial Spying]
This week my colleague Chris Buckley told the story of Wu Zhe, a senior academic at Beihang University who has a “vision of populating the upper reaches of the earth’s atmosphere with steerable balloons.”
[Read: China’s Top Airship Scientist Promoted Program to Watch the World From Above]
Whatever the origin of the balloon over Yukon, there was some confusion in both Canada and the United States that a fighter jet from the U.S. Air Force shot it down rather than a plane from the Royal Canadian Air Force.
[Read: Why a U.S. Plane Shot Down an Object Over Canada]
The cross-border blurring didn’t stop there. The radar tracking of all of the objects had been conducted through a joint Canada-U.S. military command. If nothing else, the balloons reminded Canadians and Americans about the existence of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which most people know as NORAD.
Although it has been around since 1957, NORAD usually doesn’t get much attention outside of Christmas Eve, when its North Pole-facing radar systems track the progress of Santa Claus, these days on a website.
“A lot of what they do, no Canadian will ever see,” Andrea Charron, the director of the Centre for Defence and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba, told me. “And in the U.S. it’s completely forgotten about because it is binational and nobody knows what to do with that.”
The Chinese Spy Balloon Showdown
The discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon floating over the United States has added to the rising tensions between the two superpowers.
NORAD was a product of the Cold War when three radar lines were built largely across Canada to search for Soviet bombers and, later, intercontinental ballistic missiles coming from the north to attack targets in the United States. The vast amount of money required for that came largely from the United States.
But maintaining Canada’s sovereignty over the north turned it into a binational operation. The commander of NORAD can be from either nation’s military, and he or she reports to both the prime minister and the president. (In 2006 NORAD’s role expanded to include preventing attacks coming across all of the seas surrounding the continent.)
For NORAD, obscurity does have some political advantages. Last June, Anita Anand, the defense minister, announced that Canada would, over the next two decades, spend 38.6 billion Canadian dollars, with 4.9 billion dollars coming in the first six years, to modernize NORAD’s vast array of systems and equipment.
But the announcement barely caused a ripple with the Canadian public. The lack of reaction was a stark contrast to the protracted political debate over new fighter jets that ultimately resulted in the government agreeing last month to spend 19 billion dollars to buy 88 F-35s — a plane that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau once declared to be too expensive.
And Professor Charron said that a general lack of attention to NORAD might be even more important to Washington.
She said she feared that many Republicans in Washington would probably be surprised to learn that a key component of the United States’ defense is shared with another country and would be inclined to end it.
“If anybody sat Trump down and said: So this is what NORAD does and do you know that a Canadian can be in charge of U.S. personnel and decision making, he would have lost it,” she said. “If Republicans got rid of NORAD, we would really be in serious trouble, not only Canada but also in the U.S. They need the radar systems in Canada to defend themselves.”
Trans Canada
The Trans Canada section was compiled by Vjosa Isai, a reporter-researcher for The Times in Canada.
This week’s Saturday Profile is of Lisa LaFlamme, the CTV News anchor whose dismissal may have been linked to her decision to let her hair go gray.
An inquiry found that while the use of the Emergencies Act last winter to help quell the trucker blockades that paralyzed Ottawa and border crossings was “regrettable,” the crisis had reached the point where the step was justified.
The Canadian women’s soccer team, reigning Olympic gold medalist, went on strike. But legal threats compelled the players to return to work, the team said, the latest episode in the women’s fight for equal pay.
Hazel McCallion, Mississauga’s no-nonsense mayor for 36 years, died. She was 101.
A trio of comedians attempt to script an original, feature-length romantic comedy in “Let’s Make a Rom-Com,” a new podcast from the CBC.
A wave of teenagers developed tics during the pandemic, some as a result of watching popular TikTok videos of other teenagers claiming to have Tourette’s syndrome, writes Azeen Ghorayshi, a science reporter for The Times. Azeen traveled to Calgary to meet with one family whose teenager was recovering from the tics.
Sandra Trehub, a psychologist and researcher at the University of Toronto who pioneered the study of how children perceive sound and how lullabies and music fit into their development, has died at the age of 84.
Taylor Russell, a 28-year-old actress from Vancouver, co-stars alongside Timothée Chalamet in the coming-of-age cannibal movie “Bones and All.” Ms. Russell and the artist Elizabeth Peyton, who painted a series of works based on the film, sat down for a Q. and A. with T Magazine.
The findings of forensic lab research, made in collaboration with McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, were among the tantalizing clues into the question of whether Pablo Neruda was murdered.
A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.
How are we doing?
We’re eager to have your thoughts about this newsletter and events in Canada in general. Please send them to nytcanada@nytimes.com.
Like this email?
Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here.
