Thank you for the question.
My first point, about the fact that satellite systems are always easier to attack than to defend, actually goes to the point of redundancy in space. I don't think redundancy in space is much of a protection, at least in terms of having hundreds or thousands of satellites in a single system spread around in a single orbital shell. One of the recommendations that my colleague Aaron Boley and I have made to the Department of National Defence and other NATO militaries is that they distribute their satellite systems across multiple altitudes to spread them out and make them less vulnerable. That is one simple answer to this problem.
In terms of our vulnerability in the day-to-day operations of civilian and military systems in Canada, we should keep non-satellite systems operating. To give you a simple example, we are incredibly dependent on global positioning satellites. The American GPS system is central to the Canadian economy to the point that commercial airliners are heavily dependent on GPS. For reasons I don't understand, we are removing the ground-based air navigation systems that used to exist before GPS so that more and more, we don't have a backup. If Russia or another hostile state were to somehow take down a GPS or interrupt its operations through some kind of jamming system or in-space attack, we would have a total catastrophe in civilian aviation in Canada, so don't take out those ground-based systems.
We have redundancies. Don't take out the fibre optic cables because you're relying on satellite systems. The more we have different kinds of systems in different places providing redundancy, the better we will be protected, not just against hostile attacks but against something like a massive solar storm that could also take out thousands of satellites.
Let's keep the ground-based systems in place. Don't think we can save money by removing them and just relying on satellites.