Joe Jockel, an academic who has written quite a bit about NORAD, said once that Canada needs NORAD more than NORAD needs Canada. Indeed, in my time in the United States, I found there were many senior American military officers who were unfamiliar with NORAD, and every time we'd have a visit to Colorado Springs I would take the opportunity to give them NORAD 101.
You're quite right in saying that there are maybe fewer in the United States who recognize NORAD's utility than there are in Canada, but having said that, General Jacoby, the current commander, is very supportive of NORAD. The PJBD is very supportive of NORAD and Canada-U.S. participation. Also, whether we continue to call it NORAD or not, or whether we change the name or develop some other arrangement, I think there will always be a need to have this bilateral, binational participation.
Ballistic missile defence is a responsibility of aerospace warning and aerospace control. We've signed up to that. Yes, you could argue that we could avoid it, that the Americans are making more of ballistic missile threat than really exists, but the reality is, too, that we are in NORAD, that it is a recognized mission of NORAD, and that the threat continues to evolve. There's hard intelligence that has identified what North Korea capabilities have developed to, and everybody knows that North Korea is an unstable regime, at best.