Fundamentally, it's a function of that thing we never talk about anymore: geography. We live in a very nice part of the world. We can only be touched from a distance, and the way technology has moved and military technologies have moved, the threats to Canada over the past 50 to 60 years have increasingly emerged from an age before World War II, where we really had no military threats to Canada. These have emerged because technology has enabled distance and more distant actors to be able to come and touch us.
These have all been through the development of the airplane, of ballistic missiles, and now, increasingly, space-based assets—satellites, whatever you want to call them.
If you look increasingly at how those in turn—if you think of air and space in that way, how those assets also have become more integrated within a global economy, they are fundamental to the space sector and in particular are fundamental to a modern, advanced economy like Canada's.
We are a big country. We have to talk to people along the way. We need advanced telecommunications systems and all these things. If you look at the core, in my view—if you think in traditional military terms—of how these threats are going to be manifested to Canada, the answer is they are going to come through the airspace and the electronic waves out there. That, to me, is where essentially the central focus is; that's where the forces and the government and National Defence need to concentrate their efforts, if we prioritize National Defence and defence of Canada as truly our number one priority.
That's why I think aerospace is the key element and will be for the time being.