Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.
Good afternoon. My name is Arad Gharagozli. I am the founder and CEO of Galaxia Mission Systems. We are building sovereign space capabilities for Canada, focused on next-generation earth observation systems for both defence and civil applications.
Our goal is simple: Canada should not have to rely on foreign suppliers for core space capabilities. Galaxia is the only company building a fully Canadian space mission, where every major component is designed, manufactured, integrated, launched and operated here at home with Canadian SMEs. This is a truly sovereign system, and we are on track to launching this system in early 2028, hopefully from Canadian soil.
Space is now a cornerstone of modern defence. Every domain of war-fighting is relying on space, specifically Arctic awareness, resilience in communication, intelligence gathering, targeting, navigation and so on. If we want to be a credible and capable partner to our allies, we need to pick up the pace, because we cannot afford to lag in this domain anymore.
There are several recent reports that came out specifically on Canada's defence capabilities. One is from the Canadian Space Agency. RBC just released one, and it's showing a worrying trend of Canada really falling behind. We are last in rank out of 10...from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, as well as among G7 countries, when it comes to defence spending and public spending as a whole. Annually, the U.S. is putting about $7 billion in venture funds into space capabilities. That's about seventeenfold more than what Canada is doing per capita.
What do we do about that? The answer to that is that Ottawa must become an anchor client to Canadian defence producers, and space is just a subdomain of that. Canada simply needs to buy more to enable Canadian SMEs to manufacture and innovate faster in order to become competitive globally.
We also need to rely less on foreign purchasing and on hoping that ITB will fix the gap later on. We simply need to empower our SMEs to build and innovate. This can happen through strategic procurement, scale, and financial tools focusing on technical excellence.
Right now, we create technologies and companies that are just orphans. We are developing a lot of R and D here in Canada, but that's about it. A lot of those companies do not see longer-term commercialization, so a lot of them move abroad, especially to the U.S.
Here's a very good example of how other nations are doing it. In the U.S., there is the SBIR program, which is funding these companies through small funds at the beginning, taking them through $200,000...into $1-million to $2-million feasibility studies, and later on into $50-million or $60-million procurement programs. That really puts a lot of confidence in venture funds and other funds to show that space is truly a commercial market.
Let me close with this. Canada used to lead in space; we were early. We were the third country after the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to get into space. We were bold, but leadership does not sustain and survive on nostalgia. We don't really have a lot to talk about when it comes to our future ambitions. We're really relying on what we have done in the past, and that's risky.
We can stay comfortable and watch our most innovative companies leave and grow elsewhere, or we can choose to help them lead globally by staying here in Canada. The window is narrowing. The first-mover advantage, especially in space and commercial space, is only months or years, not decades. This cycle will not break until Ottawa makes a firm decision and commits to building Canada's space and defence capabilities through a modern, predictable and rapid procurement system that anchors and skills Canadian SMEs. The clock is ticking.
Thank you.