National Defence committee  I recommend a higher risk tolerance for the government to invest in research capabilities, a willingness to fail and fail quickly, and a subvention for the private sector. We've built some of that in defence, but we've been very reticent in allowing that investment to go toward space capabilities.

National Defence committee  There are two points on that. If you look at Australia, it has the Centre for Space Governance. We have nothing comparable in this country, so we need to generate the capabilities to see what our interests are and how we assert them in a multilateral governance framework. It is something we have not quite grasped, and it requires government leadership.

National Defence committee  We have a peer competitor, a strategic rival, in China, which is able to compete at scale in space with the United States and with the western alliance. The effort of China, of course, is to disrupt the status quo of the rules-based order, not just on earth, but in cyberspace and in space.

National Defence committee  My argument would be that there needs to be a two-level effort. There's the effort that we just talked about of building international norms, which Canada has traditionally done well, but which in the cyber domain, for instance, for 25 years has not gotten us anywhere. In the absence of international norms, we need to work on deterrence and we need to work on capabilities for certain elements of punishment, whether it's kinetic or non-kinetic, for countries that cross over certain red lines.

National Defence committee  That's why we're in front of the national defence committee and not the foreign affairs committee. It's precisely because we need those deterrence capabilities. The other way to do that, if we can't agree on norms, is to forge norms. Then our adversaries know there are very real consequences on which we are prepared to follow through if they cross certain red lines.

National Defence committee  I have a short answer for you. It is actually one of the strengths that Canada has. Because we're smaller, it's much easier for government departments and agencies to talk to one another and for us to talk to both non-governmental organizations and the private sector to forge a common way forward in how we harness that.

National Defence committee  I'll defer on that question in the sense that I don't know enough about the technicalities of how space treaties are negotiated.

National Defence committee  Yes, Ms. Normandin. I believe that we have a strong incentive to do so. This incentive is the space economy, meaning the resources found in space. The space economy is currently worth $600 billion a year. By 2035, the space economy is expected to be worth $1.8 trillion, in particular as a result of resource development.

National Defence committee  That's a great question. I don't need to describe it to you. You just need to look at the conflict between Israel and Hamas. You can see what happens when, on a large scale, entities end up jamming global positioning systems and the disruption that causes to civilian life. You have a real-life laboratory.

National Defence committee  Redundancy is key, and I'll give you an analogy in an area where we've made adjustments. Russia has, for over a decade, actively been jamming, as you probably know, NATO vessels. That is why, until about 2015 or so, the U.S. Navy relied entirely on GPS systems and why the U.S. Navy went back to star navigation, the capability to operate without GPS.

National Defence committee  I'd better let the Canadian Armed Forces speak to the redundancy capabilities we have.

National Defence committee  I'm afraid I don't have an answer for you. You'd need to ask the JAG about the international law constraints and our own legal constraints. As I pointed out in my opening statement, I'm concerned that we in Canada have not done enough heavy lifting to precisely answer these types of questions—what our response would be and what our co-operation would be, both with the United States and among other allied partners, in particular middle-power partners.

National Defence committee  To my best understanding, the problem is that the answers to precisely these questions are currently ambiguous. For instance, NATO article 5 is not clear if it would apply, under what circumstances it would apply and what aspects, other than the five space treaties to which Canada is a signatory, would apply in this domain.

National Defence committee  Thank you for the question, Ms. Normandin. I'll give you a concrete example. Civil flights in the Baltic states must now be diverted and turned around as a result of interference from Russian GPS signals in civil aviation. At a number of Baltic airports, aircraft can only land with the help of satellites.

National Defence committee  I would say that the challenge of assigning responsibility isn't that significant. The issue is that we can't assign responsibility in the way that we're used to from a legal perspective, so beyond a reasonable doubt. In general, our intelligence capabilities mean that we know the perpetrators of these activities, especially when it comes to Russian involvement.