This technology or project, as I understand it, was stopped because the frequencies being used by the high-frequency surface wave radar were interfering with some frequencies used in the maritime world. So there was a conflict and it could not be resolved.
Technically, this radar was bouncing radar waves from the station about 200 miles all the way out, which is what regular radar cannot do, because past 30 miles the radar shoots out into space because of the curvature of the earth. This system would bounce radar waves back and forth and be able to monitor up to 200 miles.
In military systems, you prefer to have a number of assets covering the same area, so that if one of them goes down you have something to fall back on. If we have a solar flare, it could possibly disable Radarsat-2, and all of a sudden all that we would have is space junk up there, and we would not be capable of fixing it. It would take years, if not a decade, to get the next satellite up there. What will we have in the interim? Right now it's very little.
So that capability would have been great to monitor the access or entry points into the Arctic Archipelago, with the results superimposed on information provided by the rangers, the coast guard, and Radarsat-2, providing a good intelligence picture of what's going on in our backyard.