National Defence Committee on Oct. 31st, 2024

[Dr. Michael Byers]

This is the article 5 issue, which is self-judging. Canada could characterize such an action as an act of war—as an armed attack—or it could choose not to. There would be an attribution issue with regard to some kinds of attacks, but not with regard to others. A ground-based missile launched from Russia would quite clearly be attributable.

Again, my point is that we need to think hard in advance. We give permission to satellite companies to provide such support in a foreign armed conflict, whether or not we are prepared to be making these tough decisions later. Do we want to be in a direct conflict with a nuclear-armed state because we gave permission to a Canadian satellite company to provide support to frontline operations in a foreign armed conflict?

That's the question. It's a policy question. We need to get in front of this and decide what our criteria are for giving permission to Canadian companies to support foreign militaries.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

I understand. Thank you very much.

Dr. Steer, I guess you could weigh in on this. It's a point of clarification, and I'm wondering if you can help me understand a little better.

You said that generally, if an attack is made on one satellite, there are perhaps repercussions on others. That's what I understood. Is it possible for a country to attack only one satellite and not have fear that it would affect its own as well?

[Dr. Cassandra Steer]

It really depends on the vector of attack, and this is why it's important to understand that space systems are made up of those four segments.

If it is a kinetic, physical attack on one satellite, then our concern is what the debris is going to do to other satellites in space. In fact, as I mentioned, the much greater threats are ground-based and link-based like jamming a communications satellite link; spoofing and sending a false navigational link so you don't know where you are, where your adversaries are or where your target is; dazzling an earth observation satellite so it can't gather the information it's trying to gather; and cyber-attacks. These non-physical, non-kinetic attacks are much more prevalent, much more useful, in fact, and much harder to attribute, so they're also much more effective in times of tension and warfare.

In those senses, you're often attacking a different part of the system than just a satellite. The reason people keep talking about distributed architecture and what Spacelink has done is that, when you have many satellites, it no longer matters if you target one single satellite or one single link, because the other satellites can take the place of that, and service can continue to be provided. The more complex you make your architecture, the harder it is to attack, which is a defensive mode.

I don't know if that answers your question.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you. You gave a lot of good information there. I appreciate that.

I would like to ask you another question, Dr. Steer. You spoke about the fact that women are disproportionately impacted when it comes to armed conflict and that we should be thinking about this when looking at space and how we're dealing with that.

Can you give us a little more in terms of how this helps us understand space a little bit differently? Can you give us what recommendations you would have for Canada take on in order to make sure that we're moving that agenda forward?

[Dr. Cassandra Steer]

Because of the dual-use nature of all of these systems, because civilians are impacted when a dual-use system is targeted, we have to think about what the impacts on civilians are.

In many conflict situations, women and girls are already, for example, denied access to school, so their only access to schooling might be through having access to the Internet. They might lose absolute communications with each other as family units during the conflict situation. They might lose access to navigate to sources of water, for example. In cases where women and girls are being physically targeted with gender-based violence and sexual violence, earth observation satellites can help to gather timely, real-time evidence and information that would then aid Canadian troops to intervene.

It's both about how they're impacted negatively and also about how we can use space systems to positively ensure that Canada is implementing what its obligations are under its national action plan for the women, peace and security agenda. Canada is the first country to have explicitly included space in that national action plan, which I think is outstanding.

I think—

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Unfortunately, again, I'm going to have to interrupt the answer here.

Madame Normandin, you have two and a half minutes.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Since Ms. Lambropoulos just stole my question, so I'm going to move on to the next one.

My question is for you, Mr. Byers.

You talked about the importance of redundancy. You also talked about not getting rid of our ground-based systems, which can be used as replacements for satellite-based systems.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on two things. You said that these structures should be maintained. Should we also invest in more ground-based systems, on the one hand? On the other hand, I imagine that these ground-based systems are already used for other purposes.

Is there priority use for emergencies or domestic uses, if there is a problem with satellites? How would it work if, all of a sudden, ground-based systems had to be used as a replacement?

[Dr. Michael Byers]

That's an excellent question. I could give dozens of examples of how we have existing redundancies and how we could build more redundancies into our system. Let me give you just a simple example.

In the case of the reliance on GPS, as I have mentioned, Canada and the United States are removing a lot of our ground-based air navigation systems, because GPS is just as good and cheaper. Pilots are accustomed to using GPS for all kinds of operations. The problem is that, if GPS is off-line, if it's not accurate because of a solar storm or if jamming is occurring and it's a low-visibility day at Toronto Pearson airport, the pilots are then 100% reliant on ground-based systems for their approaches. If you were to take out that ground-based system, then the pilots would effectively be blind in low-visibility situations.

Now, no one is proposing to take the ground-based system out of Toronto Pearson airport, but we are taking ground-based systems out of a lot of smaller airports across Canada and the United States. On a normal day, 364 days a year, that's absolutely fine, but on that one day when the GPS is not functioning properly, perhaps because of a solar storm, the pilots are then in a more difficult situation. We want maximum safety with regard to essential functions like transportation. You keep the ground-based systems. You provide the redundancy.

It's the same thing with fibre optic cables. Just because we're reliant on satellites and they're absolutely fantastic, we shouldn't cancel our plans to build a fibre optic cable to Iqaluit. We should have redundant systems as much as possible.

Space is great, but if you get too reliant on one domain and you lose it for whatever reason, then you're in a real pickle. Wise policy-making is always looking to ensure backups. That's all I'm asking for here.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thanks very much.

Ms. Mathyssen, you have two and a half minutes.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

I'm sorry. Just to clarify, we're doing a third round as well. Is that right?

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Likely—

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Hopefully...?

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

—if we're a little tight.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Okay.

Dr. Byers, just to expand upon what was just said, we also then would be at risk of losing the skills in terms of people's ability to read those older systems, I guess you would call them, or those backup systems in favour of GPS. Is the human component of being able to understand them or read them or use them being lost as well?

[Dr. Michael Byers]

Yes, presumably it is. I remember having a conversation in September 2019 with a very senior U.S. Navy official who was reporting on a NATO naval exercise that took place off the coast of Norway. The Russians had jammed GPS throughout the NATO exercise. This senior U.S. officer was pleased with that, because his personnel on the U.S. Navy ships had to get out their sextants and do it the old-fashioned way in terms of navigation. The Russians had actually improved the exercise by causing this problem and rendering GPS unreliable through jamming.

Yes, we need to maintain the old ways. For instance, we need to know how to navigate an oil tanker from Vancouver out into the Pacific Ocean without GPS. We need to make sure that our ships' pilots know how to use the ground-based lighthouse systems to navigate their ships and not become too dependent on computer screens and global positioning systems.

That's a general issue. As we move further and further into digital technologies, we need to make sure we don't lose the old ways of doing things. If the Internet were lost, if satellites were lost, we wouldn't want to go back to the Stone Age. We'd want to go back to the 1990s.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

I'm not sure how much time I have left, but I'll just say, then, that it would be incumbent upon the federal government to also continue to invest in lighthouses, I would assume, which they are not.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Mr. Stewart, you have five minutes please.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses.

Dr. Byers, you talked about space junk and space debris. It's something, I think, that's been talked about for a long time. I'm wondering what the operators of spacecraft do to protect themselves from space debris. I'm not hearing about a lot of collisions or damage, or maybe I'm just not reading the right publications.

[Dr. Michael Byers]

They do several things. First of all, they will often choose to put their satellites at altitudes that have less congestion, less debris. That's one strategy, where you position your satellites and your satellite system.

Some operators build shielding into their satellites and build in redundancies. Instead of having just one electrical wire connecting two components, you have two electrical wires, so if that tiny paint fleck of space debris were to cut one of the wires, you'd have a backup that would keep the satellite operational. The more shielding you put in and the more redundancies you put in, the greater the cost of your satellite.

One of the big problems today is that some operators, led by SpaceX, have adopted the consumer [Technical difficulty—Editor] thousands of mass-produced, low-cost satellites with no redundancies. Then they have an operational life of just four or five years. Just like your cellphone, they throw it away after four or five years and send it into a re-entry trajectory.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Is there a point, like a forecast point, where we're going to reach maximum saturation of artificial satellites in space?

[Dr. Michael Byers]

There is something called the Kessler syndrome, which hypothesizes that once you get a certain rate of collisions and debris creations, you create a kind of death spiral, an ongoing cascade of debris, which eventually destroys the orbit where this is happening. It's indeed possible that we're in the early stages of this Kessler syndrome already and that in some altitudes, some orbital shells, we've gone beyond the carrying capacity and we will eventually lose access.

However, we need to combat that by insisting that satellites are capable of withstanding small debris hits by having redundancies and by having shielding, that they're built to last and that they're built for the conditions of space.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Let's talk about Iran for a second. You mentioned earlier that the countries that don't rely on space would to be the ones most incentivized to mess up our space assets. I think you specifically mentioned Iran. Have you heard from intelligence out there that Iran is actually preparing a mission to launch these space pellets to create this pellet ring to disrupt our space communications?

[Dr. Michael Byers]

No, I haven't. I don't have access to classified information, so I just can't comment on that.

I do want to seize the opportunity to say that I'm not worried about China engaging in such an attack because China has the exact same interest that western countries do in keeping space a safe place for its satellites. There's a huge opportunity for diplomacy with China on this issue. Of course, we can walk and chew gum when it comes to a great power like China. We can stand fast and build up our defences while co-operating with China on discrete issues where there is a shared interest, and this is one of them.

[Dr. Cassandra Steer]

I wonder if I might briefly interject and say that I actually don't believe there's any country on earth that is not dependent on space capabilities. There are different levels of dependency, but I think that actually reduces the likelihood of these kinetic attacks because they will be compromising their own dependencies.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Dr. Byers, earlier you mentioned MDA's RADARSAT and how it's important to us and to other countries. How does our aerospace industry, in general, compare to others on the global stage in terms of size and sophistication?