Yes, the whole idea is to grow the Canadian space industry. We keep revenue figures, and from 1996 to the present it has grown considerably. It's about a $2.5 billion industry in terms of revenues, looking at all space services and products, and it has grown steadily over time.
So yes, that is the plan, and it's also to build that capability.
The challenge that Canada has, if you compare us to the United States.... Look at Boeing or Lockheed Martin. They're big guys in the United States. They have access to potential contracts from NASA, which has a $17 billion annual budget, about 55 times bigger than the Canadian Space Agency budget. And I'm not mentioning their military budget, which is not published, but it is at least as big as the civilian budget. So when difficult times occur within the civilian side, there are huge projects on the military side. Companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin are sustained even through difficult times because there is such a large number of programs coming from the U.S. government.
In Canada we have a challenge: we have a $300 million budget. With that budget we try to satisfy our Canadian requirements, what I told you before about trying to build the industry as well. It's a tribute to our industry that it's managed to secure as many export sales as it has.
But it is not a free trade situation when it comes to the aerospace industry, and that is why in my final comment I said that we also have to provide Canadian companies like MDA with some viable continuity in Canada because of--