Back in May, the US Coast Guard announced a plan to deploy autonomous naval drones across the five Great Lakes. Contracted from the company Saildrone, the vessels are equipped with 360-degree cameras meant to monitor for illicit activity — a mission which includes surveillance of the freshwater border separating the US and Canada.
As Mike Bradley, mayor of the Ontario town of Sarnia told the CBC, the naval drones look “like something from Mars.”
Bradley says he first laid eyes on one of the Trump administration’s new surveillance boats as it sailed up the St Claire River, a natural border connecting Lake Huron with Lake St Clair, a minor body of water just east of Detroit.
In an interview, the Canadian mayor said he wasn’t happy to see the drones traversing the border, to say the least.
“There was a failure to communicate, obviously from the Americans,” Bradley said. “I also don’t know yet — and I’ll be following up — if the Canadian government knew and agreed to it, and that to me is a big issue.”
While the drones first entered service in May, the funding came via a $15.5 million proviso in Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” which passed in early July of 2025. That being the case, the US Coast Guard should have had ample time to inform their Canadian counterparts of the planned operations — though whether there was any communication about the sail drones at all remains an open question.
Bradley said he was surprised that the US side wouldn’t have given notice over such an intrusive device, given close cooperation between the US and Canadian coast guards in the past.
“I cannot understand why they wouldn’t communicate this, because obviously once you see one of these things on the Great Lakes, you’re gonna be asking questions,” Bradley said.
Though US officials have maintained that the drones are just there for “awareness” and not surveillance, the Canadian mayor evidently regards that as a distinction without a difference.
“We have thousands of boaters on the river St. Clair, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and now they’re going to be photographed and watched,” Bradley lamented. “I don’t have the trust down the road — especially with the deteriorating relationship with the US — that they won’t use them for other purposes.”
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