Trump: Canada has asked to join missile-defence program

Donald Trump says Canada has asked to join the missile-defence program his administration is building, adding a new chapter to a long-running cross-border saga.

The U.S. president dropped that news in the Oval Office on Tuesday as he unveiled the initial plans for a three-year, $175 billion US project to build a multi-purpose missile shield he's calling the Golden Dome.

"Canada has called us and they want to be a part of it," Trump said. "They want to hook in and they want to be a part of it."

Canada will pay its "fair share," he added. "We'll work with them on pricing."

There was no immediate comment from Ottawa.

What this means is still extremely murky. It's unclear what, exactly, Canada would contribute, what its responsibilities would include, what it would pay, and how different this arrangement would be from what Canada currently does under the Canada-U.S. NORAD system.

Canada has long participated in tracking North American skies through NORAD, and feeding that data into the U.S. missile-defence program.

But Canada never officially joined the U.S. missile program, which was a source of controversy in Ottawa in the early 2000s when Prime Minister Paul Martin's government refused to participate. That meant Canadians could monitor the skies but not participate in decisions about when to launch a hypothetical strike against incoming objects.

Now the U.S. is creating a new system to track various types of missiles; more sophisticated and multi-layered than Israel's Iron Dome.

It happens to be occurring as Canada commits to refurbishing its aging sensors in the Arctic.

One U.S. senator said months ago that he'd heard interest in the missile program from a Canadian colleague, then-defence minister Bill Blair. Blair publicly acknowledged the interest, saying the partnership "makes sense."

But the form of participation is unclear. The U.S. commander for NORAD appeared recently to suggest that Canada's participation will be limited to tracking threats.