National Defence Committee on May 6th, 2024

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Are there any plans to launch military-purpose satellites from your spaceport in Nova Scotia in the near future or will it launch strictly commercial satellites into space?

[Stephen Matier]

We certainly have interest from DND in what we are doing here. We also have interest from the United States Space Force.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Mrs. Gallant.

Ms. Lapointe, you have the floor.

Welcome to the committee.

[Viviane LaPointe, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Bain, you and your company talked about meeting the challenges of the new space economy. Could you describe for us what you see those challenges are?

[Stewart Bain]

The challenges of participating in the new space economy are that it's moving very quickly, so traditional procurement techniques and the ability to transform research and development into monetized commercial activity is the biggest challenge. When we talk about acceleration of activities in space, we talk about the ability to monetize early and quickly and then to grow. NorthStar as a private enterprise raised $140 million not just to develop technology but also to build and launch four satellites. If you do that on a grassroots, bootstrap method, you end up being fairly slow at how you get there.

It really is accelerated by the adoption of those products and by having a strong signal. Having those products adopted by your domestic government is very helpful in doing work internationally. Barring that, you have to be pretty aggressive to get into other procurement cycles. This year, the procurement cycle in the United States has been fairly hampered by their budget issues. It all really comes down to how quickly we get from the identification of a demand from the government and the procurement plan, so the procurement plan is the weakest link.

[Viviane LaPointe, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

In your opening statement, you talked about some strong signals that needed to be seen by government. Tell us what those strong signals look like. What would they be and constitute?

[Stewart Bain]

In a word: a contract.

[Viviane LaPointe, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

Can you expand on that?

[Stewart Bain]

Buy our services.

I don't think I'm telling any secrets. The OECD has written reports for decades about how Canada does extremely well at developing R and D and then watching that go somewhere else. We are at the precipice of that point as NorthStar, as many other commercial entities are in Canada.

There was a question in the previous panel asking how we retain talent: Make sure there's a business here. People stay for economic reasons. They sound like complicated issues, but they're very simple. When there are good jobs to be had and there are good missions going on, we have no hard time attracting talent at NorthStar. Unfortunately, most of it goes to Luxembourg, where we have our European head office, and to the United States. Attracting people in Canada is a little bit more challenging, because it's not as commercially open in that context.

That's meant as a constructive criticism, by the way.

[Viviane LaPointe, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

The previous witnesses talked about how Canada is falling behind and how we're at risk of declining relevance in this sector. What challenges do you foresee for Canada specifically in expanding its role in the space defence sector? How do you propose we overcome those?

[Stewart Bain]

It's not a secret either that Canada is by far—and I underline “by far”—the lowest contributor to space of all G7 nations. That's a huge impact to anybody who wants to start a company here, attract talent here or build innovative technologies here. I think that needs to be addressed at a policy level and at a strategic level.

The good news is the voice in the wilderness, me. My screaming for a few years now has managed to convince Space Canada, of which I'm a board member, to lobby the Canadian government to have a national space council.

The chairman of the board of NorthStar's U.S. entity is Kevin O'Connell, former director of the Office of Space Commerce under the previous administration. He helped set up or re-set up the National Space Council, and we brought him here several times to witness and testify to several people about the importance of having a national space council.

Setting that up properly is also very important. I want to emphasize, given the opportunity here, that it cannot be run by a specific government department. It must be run by the whole of government, and it must come from the Prime Minister's Office. That's the way it works in the United States, and that's the way it needs to work here. I'm very happy that we have a national space council, but if we bring it down to the departmental level, we don't get whole-of-government coverage, and we must have that.

We don't have time to waste on iterating and seeing if we can make it better. Space is moving too quickly. The actions are too menacing, and everyone is feeling it. I feel it in the questions that people are asking. You're quite aware of the challenges we're facing, so I would say that we need a national space council that has national recognition from the Prime Minister's Office.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Ms. Lapointe.

Ms. Normandin, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Bain, my questions will be along the same lines.

Without saying so specifically, you let it be known that you are a prophet without honour in Canada. You have contracts all of the United States, Europe and Japan.

Is there one main reason that Canada has not yet signed a contract with your company? Can it be attributed to a combination of factors, such as the fact that Canada does not have a strong link to its industrial base, that it does not invest much, and that it tends to invest elsewhere, in products that are already on the market, for instance? Is it a combination of factors or is there one factor in particular that has not yet been mentioned?

[Stewart Bain]

There is a military saying that if you don't have a strategy, everything is a good idea. Canada does not have a strategy. I have been working with the Canadian Space Agency for more than 30 years, and the last time there was a long-term space strategy was 25 years ago.

There is frustration on both sides. The government is just as frustrated as private companies that there is no policy stipulating the priorities and areas that should be invested in. We take a more ad hoc approach. There is too much vagueness surrounding the decisions that have to be made. It is not entirely vague, but it is not fixed either. It is not something that can be followed properly, in a strategic way. That has to be corrected.

Once again, the answer to this kind of problem is to establish a national space council, develop a strategy, and provide the necessary tools.

If the government's commercial priority does not match what NorthStar sells or will be selling in the future, we will make strategic decisions accordingly. But when things are not clear, they are not clear.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

You also answered a question from my colleague Cheryl Gallant, saying that debris can be detected very quickly when there is a collision.

To whom is that information forwarded? I imagine it would be sent to your clients. In that regard, I gather that Canada is completely in the dark when something happens in space. Is that correct?

[Stewart Bain]

I want to stress that Canada is very involved, that it works with the Americans on sites in the United States and with its allies in the Five Eyes and NATO, and plays very important roles in that regard.

Nationally, however, we are not in a position to sell our data directly to Canada.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

On the other hand, I understand that the technology you have developed provides much more accurate data and detects objects much better, and that is all under Canada's radar right now. Is that correct?

[Stewart Bain]

Yes, that's correct.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Matier, you mentioned the fact that, since there is no launching station here, we have to use stations in other countries. You also said that the market is saturated right now.

How is it decided who has priority access to launching ramps? Is priority given to the government of the country where the launching ramp is located, or is it given to a company? How does that work?

[Stephen Matier]

There are two major points to that. One is that the location matters a great deal, the space close to Florida, where you can put them into a particular trajectory into orbit, where you need them, or at Vandenberg, for example, on the west coast. Finding those locations is difficult, so location really matters for those satellites and where they're going to go into orbit to be useful.

The second part, of course, is that all the other ones internationally, especially in the United States, are government ranges. Government ranges have priority. They will kick everybody else out. For SpaceX and so on, most of what they're doing is launching other people's government missions along the way and then, in their case, flying their own satellites along the way.

So the bottleneck is space. When you build satellites on the ground, there's only one way to get them into orbit and that's to launch them. They're launching two or three times a week out of Florida and they can't keep up that tempo. All of these new launch companies are coming online and new satellites are coming online, so how are we going to get them all up there to provide service? That's where I think that opportunity is.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you.

I will save the rest of my speaking time for later on, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Okay. That's 30 seconds again.

Madam Mathyssen, go ahead for five minutes.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Mr. Matier, the fact that Canada hasn't had a satellite launch capacity to date has been a significant issue. I know that in the research you've done and the building you've done, there have also been a lot of environmental and safety concerns from the area, from the residents around there.

Can you talk about what your company's doing to ensure we're within regulations? Or maybe there aren't enough regulations—not in terms of the company but certainly in terms of the people—so maybe you can talk about the conversation around that.

[Stephen Matier]

There is a nationally recognized regulatory framework associated with spaceports in particular. I came out of doing that in the United States, working on a number of spaceports, which I have actually licensed, including in terms of environmental assessments and how you can care for the territory. It's not just the land around it; it's the space, the water and everything that goes along with it.

So working to deliver on that environmental assessment and getting that approved in 2019 was a really big piece for us, and it was really modelled after the work I've been doing in the United States on a number of similar locations.