Industry committee  I can hear you loud and clear, Mr. Chair.

Industry committee  Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I'll get to straight to the point. MDA is not just another Canadian company being reviewed under the Canada investment act. It's a company that has received significant and deliberate funding from the Government of Canada

Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Brison. I would say that certainly within the space industry the presence of ITAR restrictions has been extremely frustrating for Canadian industry in terms of its dealings with the United States, particularly since 9/11. I think every effort should be made for

Industry committee  Mr. Chair, I have a comment.

Industry committee  When I was with the Space Agency, the Patriot Act was certainly a problem for government employees because they were in direct conflict with the Canadian Human Rights Act. I can't say if private industry has any latitude to get around the Patriot Act.

Industry committee  Correct.

Industry committee  Yes. Let me first of all correct something, or not correct, but clarify something you said previously, which was that in 1998, MDA was a wholly owned subsidiary of Orbital Sciences. I just want to make the point, for the benefit of the committee, that the MDA of 1998 was not th

Industry committee  It's a difficult question. I think our ability to have astronauts fly beyond the next two or three will depend on whether we cooperate government to government with countries like the United States. They will accept a partnership providing we put something on the table that com

Industry committee  You're right, it was an arrangement between the Government of Canada and a company, MDA, back in the late 1990s. I have never seen the documentation from that time, and I was not there at the time, but I don't think it had any provisions about what would happen if MDA decided to

Industry committee  Are you talking about RADARSAT-1?

Industry committee  Well, RADARSAT-1 was a separate arrangement, and the operator of RADARSAT-1 was the Canadian Space Agency. We operated it. The data, however, were marketed by MDA through their subsidiary, RADARSAT International. They were quite successful in marketing this imagery to well over 6

Industry committee  Yes, the whole idea is to grow the Canadian space industry. We keep revenue figures, and from 1996 to the present it has grown considerably. It's about a $2.5 billion industry in terms of revenues, looking at all space services and products, and it has grown steadily over time.

Industry committee  NASA has satellites that it owns. The private sector, largely in the communications satellite business, has satellites that it owns, and the military in the United States of course owns its own military satellites. The arrangement that we had with MDA was rather unique. I don't

Industry committee  Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Constellation program I'm very familiar with, because it was a memorandum to cabinet when I was president, and this was a logical follow-on to RADARSAT-1, then RADARSAT-2, and then to Constellation. The advantage of the Constellation, of course, i

Industry committee  I believe I can answer that. Bristol Aerospace can make small satellites--sometimes called micro-satellites--that are definitely in the small category. Again, there was a deliberate decision to build that capability within Canadian industry. That is nothing compared to a satellit