Mystery and tension build up around the balloons flying over the North American skies. The United States shot down three new unidentified aircraft over the weekend, including one over Canadian skies in the Yukon. For the moment, it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions on their provenance, although heavy suspicions hang over China.
On February 4, the United States shot down and recovered the debris of a first balloon from China. Contrary to Beijing’s claims, it was not a device intended for meteorological observation. This balloon was equipped with monitoring instruments, says Washington. He was part of a fleet that the Chinese army would have sent over forty countries, on five continents.
This first episode led to an immediate deterioration in relations between China and the United States. US Foreign Minister Antony Blinken has postponed a visit to China. For its part, Beijing declined to take a call from Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin. The Chinese Ministry of Defense denounced the decision to shoot down the first balloon, seeing it as “an irresponsible and seriously erroneous act”. And China went one better on Monday, accusing the United States of having violated its airspace by sending a dozen of its own balloons since the beginning of the year alone.
The ball of diplomatic tensions between the two superpowers starts again. Surveillance balloons are now part of the spy arsenal. Inexpensive to market, difficult to detect by NORAD radars and capable of mapping the territory at high altitude, they are deemed to be a more accessible solution than satellite surveillance. The more the military turns their suspicious eyes skyward, the more reason they will find to worry about the indiscretions of China and other state actors.
If we come back with both feet on the ground, we can find other reasons to question China’s intentions. Recently, the Globe and Mail reported that Chinese researchers attached to a military school had participated in 240 studies at 50 universities with their Canadian counterparts. The topics covered are of the utmost strategic importance: space lasers, satellite guidance in space, hypersonic propulsion, etc.
This disturbing collaboration is made possible by lax federal standards on national security and the complacency of universities blinded by the king dollar. The problem is in our backyard, so to speak. McGill and Concordia are respectively the third and ninth most active Canadian universities in collaborating with Chinese researchers. The explanations provided by the two Quebec institutions (advancing research, knowledge and global collaboration) do not reassure their desire to examine the problem from the perspective of national security.
It must be said that they have very few incentives to do so. The Government of Quebec completely missed the opportunity to intervene publicly and express its concerns. Even if national security is not part of its jurisdiction, Quebec can at least hold universities accountable. As for the federal government, which promises to tighten the rules for collaboration with Chinese researchers, it has an interest in acting, and quickly. While we stare at the sky looking for spy balloons, we do not see that the Chinese military apparatus is entering our universities through the main gate.