Thank you, Mr. Chair and thank you, colleagues, for allowing me to ask a question today.
I've been looking at this sale for a couple of months now since it was announced--and by the way, gentlemen, it's good to see you again--and I'm not sure I see this as necessarily a bad thing. I see it as a new door, a new way to go for the Canadian space industry. Indeed, in my riding we have COM DEV, with 1,100 employees, and I think over 80% of the satellites in space have COM DEV hardware and software on them.
Here's my concern. The Land Remote Sensing Policy Act was written in 1992 in the United States, so clearly the government of the time, in 1998, our previous Liberal friends across the way, negotiated to give $400 million, give or take, to MDA to build a satellite, but failed to foresee the problems we're having today. In fact, I would venture to guess that none of us would be here today if this original $400 million of taxpayers' dollars had been managed better. Here we are without assurances on some of the issues that face us in this sale, so I'm going to ask you this very directly.
First of all, I'm becoming convinced we're going to get our $400 million back in terms of imaging over the next seven years. Needless to say, when Canadians invest in space, we usually get $8 back for every $1 we spend, so I don't know whether it's a great deal, but at least we're getting our money back--