Two Hercules aircraft sit beside a hangar at the Inuvik airport. The federal government is buying the privately-owned hangar, which is located adjacent to a NORAD airbase, after a Chinese buyer expressed interest in the facility.Handout
The U.S. military has been prodding Ottawa to buy a privately owned hangar adjacent to a NORAD airbase in the Arctic community of Inuvik, after a Chinese buyer expressed interest in taking over the facility.
For nearly a year, Ottawa resisted American pressure over the property, located near a strategic piece of the continent’s air-defence infrastructure that would make a prime target for foreign surveillance. The Canadian government had previously leased the hangar to shelter military aircraft, but argued it no longer had need of it.
Now, the government appears to have had a change of heart. Late last month, the Department of Public Works and Government Services reached out to the hangar’s owner to say it would like to conduct an appraisal of the 21,000-square-foot facility.
Les Klapatiuk, president of International Logistical Support Inc., put the hangar up for sale for $19.5-million in February, 2022, after Canada’s Department of National Defence told him it would no longer use the facility for its search-and-rescue aircraft and its Hercules 130 air-to-air refuelling tankers.
The hangar sits beside the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s forward operating airbase in the Western Arctic. It is located several kilometres from two satellite download sites, one belonging to National Resources Canada and the other owned by Norway’s Kongsberg Satellite Services.
The NORAD forward operating location, which is at Inuvik Airport, has hangar space for up to six fighter aircraft, and was activated for service in 1994. The airport is the only one in Canada with a paved runway that lies north of the Arctic Circle.
NORAD is operated jointly by the U.S. and Canada. A Canadian government official told The Globe and Mail that the U.S. had raised serious concerns to Ottawa that the hangar could end up in the hands of a buyer from China. The Globe is not identifying the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter.
“When we put our website up, 25 per cent of our hits were coming from China. We were getting about 110 a day out of St. Petersburg, Russia,” Mr. Klapatiuk said. “Everybody in the world knew what was going on.”
The U.S. expressed an interest in acquiring the hangar for NORAD after General Glen VanHerck, commander of NORAD and the U.S. Northern Command, visited the base on July 6, Mr. Klapatiuk said.
The following day, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Fowler, the U.S. air attaché at the American embassy in Ottawa, spoke to Mr. Klapatiuk’s real estate agent, then called Mr. Klapatiuk on July 8 to discuss the sale of the hangar.
Mr. Klapatiuk, a former RCMP officer, said he told Lt.-Col. Fowler that Chinese embassy officials had visited Inuvik in 2019, and that a Chinese company had inquired about the property after it went up for sale last year.
A month later, in August, 2022, Robert McCarty, an official at Canada’s department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, sent Mr. Klapatiuk an e-mail warning him that the sale of the property to a non-Canadian buyer could trigger a national-security review.
He decided to take the property off the market.
In September, Lt.-Col. Fowler and Lieutenant-Colonel Ryan Jerke, the U.S. assistant army attaché at the Ottawa embassy, visited the hangar to talk about buying it. But there was still no interest from Ottawa in acquiring the site.
In testimony before the Commons committee on national defence on Nov. 24, Major-General Iain Huddleston, the Canadian NORAD region commander, said he was aware of China’s interest in Inuvik, but that the military did not need the hangar.
“The hangar used to be useful for us to forward-deploy our Hercules tactical tanker. It was used for no other reason,” he said. “We no longer use the Hercules tactical tanker to support that mission. Therefore we do not need the green hangar in order to support NORAD.”
Asked about Beijing’s interest in Inuvik, Jonathan Quinn, director-general of continental defence policy at the Department of National Defence, told MPs at the committee that the government was “monitoring the potential interest in this facility from potential buyers.”
“Should a foreign company purchase this ILS hangar … there are robust measures in place to make sure the facility does not fall into the wrong hands,” he said.
Mr. Klapatiuk said Lt.-Col. Fowler told him in December that Canada would buy him out. But he said he didn’t hear anything from Ottawa until a Chinese spy balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4.
The Department of National Defence contacted him to see if it could use his hangar after two other balloons were shot down near Prudhoe Bay on Feb. 10 and Dawson City on Feb. 11.
“Then the balloons were shot down and immediately I got a call from Canada, saying, ‘Hey, we need your hangar,’ ” he said. “So we are now moving into another phase with the Canadian government.”
Mr. Klapatiuk said a real estate appraiser based in Edmonton, representing the federal government, plans to visit Inuvik on April 10.
The U.S. embassy declined to discuss the matter, but spokesperson Christina Higgins pointed to a March 24 joint statement from President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in which Canada committed to spending $7.3-billion on northern forward operating locations for new F-35 fighter aircraft.
The planned expenditures include “airfield improvements to accommodate aircraft personnel, fuel, and munitions, to ensure NORAD’s ability to deter and defend against emerging threats to our air and sea space and compete with China and Russia for years to come.”
Daniel Le Bouthillier, head of media relations for the Department of National Defence, said the department stopped leasing Mr. Klapatiuk’s facility in 2021 because it no longer required the building.
But he said Ottawa is now considering whether it still might need the hangar.
“We assess that the hangar is a useful, but not critical facility for military operations, and therefore, we continue to explore its potential,” he said. “Through our $38.6-billion NORAD Modernization plan, we are investing in Northern infrastructure used by NORAD at Forward Operating Locations. In this context, we are looking carefully at what infrastructure will be required to support military requirements at Inuvik and other Northern sites, going forward.”
Inuvik, the hub of Canada’s western Arctic, lies on a channel of the Mackenzie River delta 97 kilometres from the Beaufort Sea, which is part of the Arctic Ocean.
Inuvik’s airport is the closest in Canada to the most westerly point of the Canadian Air Defence Identification Zone in the Arctic, a band of airspace north of the country’s main landmass. Canada, like all countries, tries to identify and control any aircraft that enter its air defence identification zone.

This data comes from MediaIntel.Asia's Media Intelligence and Media Monitoring Platform.