Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate, Mr. Bujold, that you're not at liberty to agree with me that maybe it was a mistake to sell off this technology and lose government control of it, but it was raised at the time by my colleague Alexa McDonough that this very situation we're in today with losing national control of this technology is one that was foreseen at the time.
My colleagues have raised questions about getting the data, that we paid for the data. I think we may well find a satisfactory arrangement to keep getting the data, but there is another piece of this that is integral to Canadian sovereignty, and that is in the Remote Sensing Space Systems Act, as you know, which would give Canada priority access to the satellite. That act allowed Canada to move aside commercial interests and say that when we had an interest of national security, there was an environmental necessity or a defence necessity, the government had priority access.
A legal opinion by the Rideau Institute has been made public that says U.S. law will now trump Canadian law once this technology is owned by the U.S. Do you have an opinion on that, on whether that would be the case, and whether we ought to have safeguards put in place to prevent this situation?