Canadian Military Activates Counter-Drone Defenses At Naval Bases, Wrestles With Halifax Harbor Identification Problem

The Canadian Armed Forces have quietly activated counter-drone systems at major ports and air bases, starting with the naval installations that protect frigates, submarines, and Arctic patrol ships in port. Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee, commander of the Royal Canadian Navy, told CBC News in an interview published May 7 that the country already has “some capability” to take drones out of the sky around its warships. The Royal Canadian Air Force is following on bases that will host the F-35, the P-8 Poseidon, and incoming remotely piloted aircraft.

The deployment runs into a problem Canadian commanders openly admit they have not solved: telling apart a hostile drone over Halifax Harbor from a Canadian civilian filming a warship coming home. The country also has not figured out how to jam threats inside a downtown without taking commercial communications offline with them. Both questions move into public view as Canada accelerates its counter-drone build out.

Naval Installations Activated First, Air Bases Next

The Royal Canadian Navy has counter-drone systems running at its bases now, the Royal Canadian Air Force is rolling out protections around airfields slated to host the F-35 and P-8, and the Department of National Defence is testing urban-focused systems through its IDEaS innovation program for cities like Ottawa. Topshee said the work is happening in close coordination with Transport Canada and the RCMP.

Lt.-Gen. Jamie Speiser-Blanchet, commander of the RCAF, told a House of Commons defence committee in January that counter-UAV systems are already in place at certain Canadian locations and continuing to be developed elsewhere. CBC asked Speiser-Blanchet for a separate interview and was denied. CBC also asked the Department of National Defence to elaborate on the specific systems being deployed and was denied. The reticence tracks with how Canada’s NATO partners have handled their own programs after watching Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb on June 1, 2025, when 117 drones launched from inside Russian territory hit five strategic airbases across five time zones, damaging or destroying up to 41 aircraft including Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 strategic bombers.

Falcon Shield Anchors The Fixed-Site Defense

The Italian-British Falcon Shield system, made by Leonardo, is the platform Canada bought to protect fixed sites including airfields and critical installations. It uses radar, high-performance cameras, and jamming to detect and defeat small, slow, low-flying drones in the Group 1 to Group 3 weight class that conventional air defense radars often miss.

The first phase of the contract, valued at $25 million in 2024, sent Falcon Shield to Latvia under Operation REASSURANCE to protect Canadian troops from small surveillance and kamikaze drones. The second phase, now apparently underway according to CBC’s reporting, deploys systems on Canadian soil to safeguard critical installations and airfields. Leonardo’s February 2024 announcement of the contract with Public Services and Procurement Canada included a 10-year sustainment package with options for additional equipment and capability development. The same Leonardo system is in service with the UK Armed Forces, where it is called ORCUS in RAF service, and was deployed at London Gatwick and Heathrow during the 2018 and 2019 drone disruptions.

Canada also tested an “above-the-horizon” laser in 2024, built by Boeing and Australian firm AIM Defence, which CBC described as a high-energy, non-kinetic hard-kill method for engaging drones at long range. The laser route matters because it sidesteps the worst tradeoffs of jamming in cities, which is the harder problem Canadian commanders are still working through.

The Halifax Harbor Problem

Canadian commanders have not solved the basic identification question. Cmdr. Philip Durand, the navy’s director of naval requirements for sensors and warfare, put it bluntly in his CBC interview: when a warship enters Halifax Harbor, it is genuinely hard to tell whether a drone coming off Point Pleasant Park is a hostile platform or a Canadian who thinks the frigate looks cool from the air.

Durand framed it as a domestic-law problem: the navy has to figure out how to determine that something is a hostile drone, so self-defense applies, before engaging what may be a Canadian’s property. Topshee made the parallel point about kinetic intercepts in cities. The people of Halifax, he said, would not be excited about munitions being fired off to bring down a drone over downtown. Jamming carries its own collateral problem. Chris Hood, founder of CTRL, a data infrastructure and analytics firm cited in the CBC piece, said the danger is that powerful jammers cascade beyond their target. Losing Rogers communications for a day or two is painful enough on its own. Knocking it out across an entire airspace is worse.

The Halifax framing is not theoretical. Denmark closed Copenhagen Airport for nearly four hours in late September 2025 after unidentified drones appeared in its airspace, then banned all civilian drone flights nationwide ahead of an EU summit, while NATO deployed the German frigate FGS Hamburg to patrol Copenhagen’s waters. Danish authorities later identified the PUSHPA, a sanctioned Russian shadow-fleet tanker, as one of three vessels suspected of serving as launch platforms for the drones that disrupted Copenhagen. Three large drones surveilled Belgium’s Kleine Brogel airbase, which stores U.S. nuclear weapons, on the night of November 1-2, 2025, evading Belgian military jammers and a police helicopter. The incidents in Europe have been the operational case study for what Canada is now trying to prevent.

Aeronautics Act Amendments Strengthen Interdiction Authority

Per CBC’s reporting, the federal government amended the Aeronautics Act earlier this year to strengthen its authority to interdict unauthorized drones that pose security risks. The amendments run in parallel with the operational deployments at CFB Esquimalt and elsewhere, and they sit alongside Transport Canada’s broader RPAS rules update from 2025 that opened up Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations under the Level 1 Complex Operations framework.

Mubin Shaikh, a former Canadian security intelligence counter-terrorism operative cited in the CBC piece, argued the federal government still needs to move faster, and that the Canadian public has to accept the government will sometimes interdict drones in domestic airspace. That is a harder ask in 2026 than it was in 2022. The base case Canadian commanders are now planning against is no longer hobbyist incidents around airfields. It is hostile state actors and organized crime using small drones for surveillance and kinetic attacks.

DroneXL’s Take

The Canadian story is the same story the rest of NATO is now living through, just told with Canadian geography. We’ve been covering the European version of this since last September. Copenhagen and Oslo airports getting shut down. Munich shut down twice by what German intelligence assessed as professional military platforms. Kleine Brogel surveilled while storing U.S. nuclear weapons. Ukrainian operators flying Sting interceptors in the Wings of Defense exercise to teach Danish forces how to do the work. The pattern is so consistent at this point that the Canadian deployment reads like overdue catch-up rather than fresh news.

What is genuinely interesting in the CBC interviews is what the commanders did not pretend to have solved. Durand’s Halifax Harbor framing is a sharp piece of self-honesty that I have not heard from a U.S. or European counterpart in this much detail. The same people who fly DJI Mavics and Autels recreationally in Halifax are the people whose drones now have to be filtered out of a hostile-actor threat picture, in real time, by a navy that operates under domestic Canadian law and Charter rights. That is a much harder engineering and legal problem than just buying a Falcon Shield. Leonardo can ship the radar. Leonardo cannot ship Canada an answer to “is this drone a threat or is it Steve from Dartmouth.”

The “above-the-horizon” laser path is the more elegant answer to the urban-jamming tradeoff. The UK’s DragonFire laser achieved its first above-horizon intercept and is heading for Royal Navy Type 45 destroyers by 2027 at roughly 13 USD per shot. A laser does not knock out Rogers. A laser does not interfere with civilian aviation comms. The Boeing and AIM Defence test in Canada in 2024 was on that same path. Whether DND is willing to fund a domestic laser deployment at the scale Halifax or Esquimalt would actually need is the question that was not put to Topshee in the CBC interview, and the answer matters because it determines whether the urban jamming problem ever stops being the bottleneck.

Watch the next House of Commons defence committee appearance by Speiser-Blanchet for whether the RCAF is willing to publicly disclose which bases have systems in place. Right now DND is keeping the list classified. The longer that list stays classified, the longer the Canadian public is asked to accept that drones will sometimes be brought down in their airspace without being told the locations or the rules of engagement. Topshee himself acknowledged that the public has to be brought along on this. The “bring them along” part has not started yet.

Sources: CBC News, Leonardo, Canadian Defence Review.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.