Thank you for recognizing me.
I think one could reasonably take the view that it would have been better to keep the development of Radarsat-2 vested entirely within the government agency, the Canadian Space Agency, rather than constructing the private-public partnership that was used to build Radarsat-2. But one could equally take the position that the government of the day should simply have done a better job in constructing the private partnership with MDA.
In any respect, that is to some degree water under the bridge. The question is, what do we do now to fix any mistakes that were made? I think the blocking of this sale is a fine step in that direction, and I applaud the government for that.
In terms of the question of whose sovereignty would be reinforced if we had only occasional access to the satellite, that's a very pertinent question, because it's not simply a question of us losing priority access to the satellite, it's a question of losing something called “shutter control”, the ability to block the use of the satellite by others for certain purposes.
For instance, I would presume that the Canadian government would not allow Radarsat-2 to be used to take images of Kandahar airfield in Afghanistan, images that might then be used by someone purchasing them on the open market internationally. Those images we would want to restrict to us and to our NATO allies there.
Shutter control is just as important as priority access. This is a satellite that the Canadian taxpayer paid for, not just for the images that we get from time to time but also for the control.