Thank you for that.
RADARSAT-2 is particularly good at the mapping of sea ice. It can actually measure the thickness of the ice. This is part of the reason we developed it; part of the way it was developed was to fulfill this kind of purpose. It's very good at tracking vessels; it is even reportedly able to detect submarines that are in relatively shallow water, as they might be were they entering the Northwest Passage. So this technology is almost purpose-built and purpose-designed for our northern sovereignty assertion needs.
It just happens, in parallel to that, to be extraordinarily good for a host of military applications, including tracking armoured vehicles at night through clouds and helping to identify targets of various kinds. It's this dichotomy between the peaceful purposes and the military purposes that to some degree engages the discussion we're having today, because ATK doesn't want it for ice mapping; it wants it for the military applications. Canada needs it for these peaceful purposes.
Whether Canada might wish to explore some of these other purposes as well is, I think, something this committee needs to consider. We do have armed forces engaged in combat operations overseas that could benefit from this kind of imagery as well. Now, it's pretty obvious that in the context of a coalition with the U.S. armed forces, we're probably sharing imagery very freely, but here's another reason we might want to keep this imagery under our shutter control: if, for instance, in some future scenario we are in a foreign conflict without our American allies, we might decide that we need shutter control in order to get priority imagery so that we can actually protect our soldiers in the field.
There are lots of reasons and lots of applications, but this satellite was built to give us that sovereign capacity--to say we need something here and we need it now.
