Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre barely had a chance to see if the nickname “Carbon Tax Carney” for the country’s new prime minister would gain traction before Mark Carney pulled the rug out from under him by axing the unpopular tax meant to wean folks off fossil fuels as one of his first moves. (Sorry eh, Greta.) Hating on Justin Trudeau and vowing to undo one of his signature achievements was pretty much Pete Polyester’s whole bit, and both have been taken away in one fell swoop, but his new “Sneaky Carney” may actually make it onto voters’ radar before the upcoming federal election.
Not necessarily in a bad way although it’s more likely to just be a blip.
Last week the unelected new PM went all art of the deal with his Australian counterpart, Anthony Albanese, to buy a $4.5 billion long-range radar system to help maintain Arctic sovereignty that was originally earmarked for the US. But, as with when it came to fighting in both world wars, Canada got there first.
“The world is changing,” said Carney when announcing major improvements to NORAD’s Santa Claus tracker on a recent visit to Iqaluit, along with pledging another $293 million for a beefed up military presence in the melting Arctic and its increasingly open seas. “Our adversaries are increasingly emboldened. International institutions and norms that have kept Canada secure are now being called into question. The United States’ priorities, once closely aligned with our own, are shifting.”
“Shifting” is certainly putting it more diplomatically than Shifty Shift would.
The Aussies’ Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) system is considered the most advanced in the world because it isn’t limited by line-of-sight like traditional radar and can go beyond the horizon to detect ships and planes over a range of nearly 2,000 miles. Not to mention any wayward Chinese weather balloons.
The way it works is a bit like a bank shot in pool. High-frequency radio waves are beamed into space and then refracted down to show a target. It’s a way to get around stealth technology because it can spot an aircraft’s wider profile from above. Things might’ve gone very differently for Maverick, for example, if the unnamed foreign country that was totally Iran in the new Top Gun movie had access to it to see his fancy plane coming.
The timing of the purchase, the most lucrative military export in Oz’s history, may seem like poking the bear given a certain someone’s insane threats about seizing Greenland and Canada, but it was actually in the works for several years. America would’ve gotten their hands on it first if it weren’t for those meddling kids and their DOGE, according to the Australian Broadcasting Company:
In recent meetings, senior Australian officials have continued discussing exporting and installing the JORN technology on the United States’ west coast, but the massive project faces uncertainty under the Elon Musk-led DOGE audit of Pentagon spending.
For well over a year, American military officials have privately expressed interest in purchasing Australia’s JORN technology because of its potential to monitor military movements as far away as China’s mainland.
One senior Australian official confirmed to the ABC that “the Canadians were always going to follow the US purchase and slipstream off that” but circumstances changed and “things moved quickly.”
(While President Musk has Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, it’s worth noting Australia has long laid claim to having the biggest balls of them all.)
General Jennie Carignan, the country’s chief of defense, told reporters last year she estimated Canada had about five years to prepare for long-range threats from Russia and China, which are both building new hypersonic missiles able to fly five times the speed of sound and change course mid-air, making it obviously much harder to predict targets.
The eye-in-the-sky system is expected to be ready to roll by then, and the plan for now is to point it north. There’s a certain irony to Carney beating the carnival barker-in-chief to the punch on it because — unlike pretending Canada is one giant cartel-led fentanyl lab as an obvious MAGA pretext for some yeehaw raping and pillaging — Dear Leader is actually correct about us being laggards when it comes to defense spending. Not unlike a broken clock twice a day.
We’ve basically been Edward Furlong in Terminator 2 for decades while daring bad actors to call us a dipshit with a murderous T-1000 sitting right beside us. But we never predicted Terminators would be reprogrammed to terminate our faces!
The country now finds itself in unchartered territory and looking for new allies at a time when a huge chunk of our military apparatus is entwined with an enemy’s, and South Korea has already reached out with offers to sell Ottawa a bunch of howitzers, planes, rocket launchers, and submarines. Maybe they’ll throw in some StarCraft tips too. Or taekwondo lessons since elbow strikes are all the rage in Canada at the moment.
The two countries already have an established working relationship due to us fighting by their side in the Korean War, and we should all be grateful for the master class they recently gave to the world about how to deal with a wannabe dictator.
Although it’s a shame so many top Democrats somehow missed it.
[BAE Systems / ABC / NORAD / Ottawa Citizen / Bluesky]
