Madam Speaker, there are two points I want to make.
First, earlier, I heard the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Defence say, during his speech, that this type of satellite could be very important for the surveillance of our remote regions.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs now argues that the satellites would be used for very peaceful purposes, such as monitoring the environment, climate change, and so on. However, it seems to me that I heard the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence just say that they would also be used to provide surveillance of remote areas and Canada's Arctic coasts.
Therefore, they would not be used solely for meteorological and agricultural purposes, but also for military purposes. We want to restrain their use for military purposes and find out just how far we will go in that area.
What will we do with these data afterwards? Will they be released to someone else? Will the Americans be able to get their hands on them? These are all questions we want to address in committee.
The second thing that I wanted to say as well to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs concerns the entire question of jurisdiction. This lets me raise this question of jurisdiction.
The government says it wants to study natural resources management. I presume that it wants to examine the state of the forests, for example, to see whether there are pests that are destroying our forests and what we can do to stop this. I agree with that.
As for the management of agricultural products, I have seen remote sensing at the agricultural research centre in Saint-Jean. This was on pest species. Satellite images could perhaps provide a means to fight them, and it would have been impossible to know that without the images coming from a satellite. It is the same for environmental disasters. We are able to predict them, and once the disaster has happened, we can develop an action plan with these satellites.
I want to remind the parliamentary secretary that these are provincial jurisdictions. Consequently, I am not talking about an agreement. However, I agree that the federal government has jurisdiction in space. When matters under provincial jurisdiction are going to be examined from space, there needs to be some intergovernmental relationship there somewhere.
For example, if this satellite looks at Quebec forests to try to assess the damage caused by a pest, will Quebec be able to have this data? Since this is a provincial jurisdiction, it will often be Quebec that remedies the situation or provides the means to fight this pest.
The data should not remain with the Government of Canada, especially if provincial jurisdictions are affected from space. This issue should be discussed further.