National Defence Committee on May 11th, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you, Professor Coates.

I will now give the floor to Ms. Gallant.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

If I have any time left over, I will share it with my colleague, Laurie, since it's his birthday.

With respect to COM DEV, I want to talk about the satellite and the transmission. What is the delay time between the time the satellite is taking the picture, so to speak, and transmitting it to somebody who can see it? Is it real time, or is there a delay?

[John Keating]

Yes, there is some latency there, but it's very short. In the picture I showed you there are some ground stations. They're in the far north of Canada and also in the south. In fact, we're negotiating at the moment to put one down in the Antarctic.

What happens is that as the spacecraft fly over, they downlink the data and then it goes through a fibre optic cable back to the operations centre. So it's a very small period of time between when the image is gathered and when the information gets back to the operations centre.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

And the images can be taken not only of our territorial waters, but we could see an approaching vessel that is beyond our zones. Is that right?

[John Keating]

It's very interesting, actually, because it's global coverage. Today we're talking about Arctic sovereignty and our concern to understand what's happening there. But Canada has a great interest in everything. We're interested in what's happening off our coasts in terms of monitoring fishing, in terms of terrorist threats, and in terms of drug interdiction. There is a whole raft of potential applications for knowing what's happening off the east and west coasts of Canada as well.

On a global basis, we have interests. We have shipping interests all over the world. If we are interested in what's happening in the Gulf of Aden, for example, in terms of the threats from pirates there, with this system in place we and our allies would know exactly where everybody is and could coordinate and organize looking after those things more effectively. So it is a global system.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

You spoke earlier about the frequency of evolution. What I'm getting at is how often can we see a certain sector?

[John Keating]

It's very simple. In the worst case, it would be one and a half hours.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Worst case.

[John Keating]

Worst case.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

That's anywhere in the world.

[John Keating]

That's at the equator, because that's where there's the most space. As this thing goes around, there's more room at the equator. Therefore, it goes there less frequently. As you go further north, you see it more frequently, every hour or every half hour or so. And with ships travelling at the speed they do, that's more than adequate to manage maritime awareness and maritime safety.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

We were told earlier there's virtually no technology that could get that kind of information to the operations centres in good time, because of the curvature of the earth.

[John Keating]

That's right, because traditionally what happens is that most spacecraft are in something called a geosynchronous arc. If you imagine the earth is spinning on its axis here, if you put a satellite 36,000 kilometres in space, it rotates at the same speed that the earth rotates, so it orbits the earth once a day, the earth rotates once a day, and it looks like its fixed in space. So by far and away, most satellites are in that arc.

The dilemma is that if you're directly below, you can send signals up and down quite easily. As you go up toward the poles, the look angle gets shallower and shallower and shallower, to the point where you can't actually communicate with the north. You can't see what's going on, you can't communicate with the north, so there are no broadband services, there is very little in terms of weather monitoring, and there are no maritime surveillance tools available there.

Our solution is completely different from that. It involves small satellites. They're in very low earth orbit. Instead of 36,000 kilometres, it's 700 kilometres. They're rotating around the earth, and they go around the earth once every hour and a half, dumping that data down on a regular basis.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

To what types of organizations are you currently transmitting this data? Do you transmit it to corporate entities as well as governments?

[John Keating]

At the moment we've built a demonstration satellite that is flying. That information is being used today by the Canadian Department of National Defence to do evaluations and compare it with other sources of maritime surveillance data. They are very pleased with it. The intention for us is to provide the solution that satisfies the needs of Canada. That's our primary thrust and it's our primary obligation.

What we'd like to do is to do that in such a way that we can share that data with our allies. But that's a decision for Canada to make, in terms of our capacity to share that data with our allies around the world, for government purposes.

What COM DEV has been doing is talking to other people in other parts of the world to ask, “Would you be interested in a subset of that data?” The International Maritime Organization regulates very carefully who gets what data, and we're talking about potentially reselling that data to people in Australia or New Zealand or Norway or Great Britain.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Do your satellites have any infrared capabilities to see below the ice?

[John Keating]

Today I'm just talking about one type of satellite, which is a satellite that's gathering regular frequency signals from ships.

In truth, the Canadian Space Agency long-term space plan that I alluded to earlier actually talks about a series of microsatellite constellations that have tremendous functionality. The first one we're talking about is maritime surveillance. Even on this satellite, we have a low data rate transponder, which can pick little messages up around the world to do water monitoring, or monitor forest fires, or gather information that is used around the world.

Following off from that are optical spacecraft that map the earth. We're in dialogue with some folks in Alberta about using that as a planning tool when people are doing oil development and exploration, building roads and tailing ponds using satellite data. There are ways of using radio occultation to get much better weather-predictive tools using microsatellites. Indeed there's a thing called a microbolometer that can go on the spacecraft, and it looks down and does infrared monitoring and can gather bits of information. COM DEV has built satellite equipment like that for other people before. In fact, COM DEV's MOPITT satellite is an instrument that is flying today on a U.S. spacecraft that for years has been the premier satellite for gathering information about what's happening with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That's using an instrument that's designed and built in Canada.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

We had the NATO parliamentarians from Europe here last week. One of the topics of discussions was the Arctic and sovereignty, because we share sovereignty. What we've learned is that the more likely route to be used is right over the pole as opposed to through the Northwest Passage. The representatives wanted to know whether or not Canada has the capacity to police these waters.

This question might be more for Mr. Coates. It's very important for NATO partners to know this, because should there be a perceived invasion, it's all the member countries' responsibility to respond. The question then is this. Based on what our current defence is, do we have the capacity to properly patrol our waters?

[Dr. Kenneth Coates]

The short answer is no; we're quite deficient in that regard.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Perfect. Thank you. You're very efficient.

Mr. Russell, you have five minutes.

[Todd Russell, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It's a pleasure to be here with you, at least for this particular meeting.

I want to come back to that quote, “To develop the North, we must know the North. To protect the North, we must control the North.” I'm sure this was not taken from the Inuit perspective, this particular quote.

First of all, when you talk about development, it almost has a certain connotation of somehow being primitive, which it isn't. Secondly, on “we must know the North”, well there are 40,000 Canadians who know the north very well, and they're the Inuit of the north, and we don't seem to include them within our strategy.

Regarding “to protect the North we must control the North”, I just want to ask a question to Mr. Coates and to Mr. Reimer. I just read the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans report talking about the coast guard. It seems that throughout this document there is a fair criticism that the Inuit have been ignored, in terms of the development of the strategy and maybe now the implementation of the strategy. We have legally binding agreements with the Inuit, from Labrador right to the Yukon, the land claims agreements.

There is a conference happening this week, actually right here in Ottawa, starting today, about the problems regarding land claims implementation. Do you think if we had proper implementation of those claims, which are enshrined in the Constitution of Canada, that would actually add to our sovereignty in terms of a legal perspective? Secondly, if we strengthen the self-determination—and that's kind of an oxymoron, but if Inuit had the tools for self-determination—does that not also enhance sovereignty?

The only other question I have is that we have a lot of assets out there within the north—Labrador, I agree, Mr. Coates, should be included, as well as the Yukon. We have a base for instance--$90 million goes in there every year--and we have 68 regular force personnel on that particular base. Because of the urgency, should not the Department of National Defence and other agencies be taking a very close look at the existing assets we have and how they can be better utilized in terms of developing our Arctic sovereignty and our whole policy around that particular issue?

[Dr. Kenneth Coates]

Thank you very much for a whole series of great questions.

We should be looking at our existing assets. We have facilities across the region. It's interesting that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities has taken a strong interest in exactly this issue. Their concern is that they have resources and needs, and if they can be combined with the current sovereignty issue we might get win-win situations all around. That would be excellent.

On implementing land claims, we have a long way to go. They are very complicated things to implement. We haven't done as much as we could to resolve them. There are a lot of big issues there. When they are implemented we're going to see a very different and much more positive world, because of the incorporation of indigenous understanding and engagement with Canada. The land claims process is a way in which a lot of indigenous people bought into this country in a very real and important sense. I think it helps.

We capitalize on indigenous knowledge in the north through the Canadian Rangers, as I'm sure you know. The remarkable ability of those people who provide us with eyes and ears and access to these regions is really quite profound.

There's a huge and very difficult debate between western science and indigenous knowledge. It is unseemly at times, but enormous learning in both directions has occurred, and where we've opened up our minds to working with indigenous people, we've learned a lot. Some great developments can take place there as well.

Thank you.

[Todd Russell, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

Thank you.

[Chester Reimer]

I'd almost echo everything Professor Coates has said. In fact, before he said “win-win” I had already written it down. It's a cliché, but there is a “win-win” in your first question. Proper implementation of land claims would be better for the Inuit and all Canadians.

Right now there's a lawsuit in Nunavut versus the Canadian government, as you know. We need to settle that and take a look at it. The answer is absolutely yes, that if land claims are properly implemented and further developed, it can only work well for all Canadians.

You asked whether further strengthening of self-determination for Inuit or other indigenous peoples assists Canadian sovereignty. Absolutely. A lot of Canadian sovereignty claims are based on land use and occupancy by Inuit, so it's logical that self-determination for Inuit—who are not advocating a declaration of independence—is a declaration of working together. That means the rights have to be respected.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much, Mr. Reimer.

We'll give the floor to Mr. Boughen.