It's important to recognize that Canada's national space policy or strategy, if there is one, is in fact made up of not one but many elements, and the real issue of the absence of a national space policy or strategy stems from the absence of a coherent integrated approach to it.
National defence is one specific approach to dealing with military space, and that overwhelmingly is trying to assure access to vital U.S. capabilities, military space capabilities, as well as commercial capabilities. It's important to recognize in this regard that the United States military relies 80% on commercial satellites. That's an important thing that's been lost as well, in this debate.
So you have this element of it, and the centrepiece, of course, for national defence is the first defence satellite being built by MDA, which will operate it as well. I'm not sure what the status of all that is in terms of this issue that's involved--Project Sapphire.
You have CSA's element embedded in industry where the Radarsat model, as far as I understand it, exists. This is really about leveraging technology to create capacity to then develop economic benefits for the nation, usually by accessing foreign markets, of which the United States is the most important.
You have the CSA, which increasingly over the past ten years has begun to focus more and more of its attention away from space exploitation for terrestrial purposes into exploration. If you look at its budgetary share and where that's going, we're unique in this country in terms of our space agency. The proportion that we spend on exploration is much higher than that of any other nation relative to the proportion for terrestrial exploitation, which has been the focus, particularly for the Indians and the Europeans. That's taking it in one direction in terms of technology. So the CSA and Industry Canada aren't necessarily on the same page.
Then, of course, there's the Department of Foreign Affairs, which is driving a multilateral strategy about a space security regime. So when one talks about a national policy and about space as a strategic asset, a strategic domain to defend Canadian interests, to protect the Canadian economy, to protect its critical infrastructure, to defend its sovereignty, etc., one needs to develop a coherent approach that pieces all this together against the realities of what Canada can reasonably expect to invest over the next 10 to 20 years in space and where those developments are.
This is an area where the Radarsat or remote sensing and the ability to exploit that one area of critical capability with a degree of comparative advantage right now and use that to develop a coherent strategy come into play. Not only can this contribute to Canadian national security, but it can leverage, of course, benefits from our allies and make a real contribution to our allies on the international security stage.
In this regard, I just want to add an important side point. The Radarsat-2 for the United States was never about Arctic sovereignty. It was about the resolution of Radarsat-2 and its impact elsewhere in the world if other people could get access to it. They were looking for assurances that no one else could get access to that type of precise high-resolution technology.
Going back to what a national policy or a national strategy should look like, it has to be woven together out of the institutional interests of separate organizations. Right now, the lead in that is industry via CSA, but with CSA not really going in the industry direction, notwithstanding what will come out of the strategic review that's under way right now with the Canadian Space Agency. Defence and foreign affairs and all the other elements are going to have to be woven together with this as part of a coherent strategy.
Up until now we've had a strategy and policy running at best on parallel tracks, and at times on contradictory tracks.
