Industry committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. I am Dan Goldberg, president and CEO of Telesat. I am here today with Ian Scott, Telesat's executive director of government and regulatory affairs. Thanks very much for inviting us this morning to discuss this impo

Industry committee  You've nailed about 80% of it, which is better than I usually do the first time around. Thank you for your compliments about Telesat. I share your view. It's a great company. It's a company that is actually doing quite well today. We've been growing very, very rapidly. I beli

Industry committee  Succinctly, I was listening very closely to Mr. Bureau, and we are not a BDU. Unlike the BDUs, we don't really influence—never mind “don't really”; we don't influence at all what programming is distributed up there, or in Canada, or anywhere else in the world. Mr. Bureau said t

Industry committee  Could you repeat the question, please?

Industry committee  I'm not 100% familiar with the SIRIUS situation, but I think the very important distinction between what Telesat does and what SIRIUS does is exactly the point that Mr. Bureau raised earlier about the difference between a BDU and something like Telesat, which is not a BDU and own

Industry committee  In the commercial satellite industry, the satellites themselves are owned by individual companies. We own 12 satellites, and our competitors, as I mentioned, have much larger fleets. In order to actually have the satellite in space, a company like ours needs to go to a country, a

Industry committee  Of the satellites that we have, eight satellites are over the North American arc. Again, a satellite is capable of seeing about a third of the earth's surface. Of the others ones we have, three satellites are over the Atlantic Ocean region, and these satellites are capable of pro

Industry committee  Two of those satellites are licensed to us by the Federal Communications Commission in the U.S. We have one orbital location through the Government of Brazil, and their regulator is called Anatel. We have one through the Government of Tonga, which has gotten itself into the busin

Industry committee  It is for two things, and that's one of them. One is to have a stock currency we can use to acquire other companies, because not all selling shareholders just want cash. If you bring satellite companies together, you create value. Oftentimes, the selling shareholders want to be p

Industry committee  No.

Industry committee  It is the latter. It is a very anomalous situation. Our U.S. and European competitors come to this market to compete with us, and we lose business to them all too often, including from DND. We recently lost some attractive business there. Our competitors come in and they don't

Industry committee  No. Zippo. For a decade now, they've been authorized to come in and compete with us, and they do. We have 12 satellites. Industry Canada has licensed 75 foreign satellites to come in. They cream-skim the bottom of the country....

Industry committee  Do you mean commercial--

Industry committee  Communications satellites? There are a few hundred.

Industry committee  I told you that Intelsat has 56 today. They have eight more under construction. The bigger guys are getting bigger and bigger and bigger than we are every single day.