Finance committee  The industry has grown. It's not that any specific programs have gone away, it's just the amount of money available that's going to programs is going down in real terms. It's what I call a policy of benign neglect: we don't know what's going on; we just ignore it; we just fix the budgets and eventually it'll sort of disappear.

Finance committee  Yes, well, there are some detailed numbers, but it's more complex than that because you start with an A-base budget, which was $320 million, and over years and years the effective buying power of that is reduced. Second to that, this money is taken out for other things. In fact, I think maybe even some of the generic work that's going on at the moment is talking about taking money out of the budget, which is amazing to me.

Finance committee  There are lots of choices. What would I pick? There's a range of things. I think we ought to have an emergency communications network. If you look at what happened in New Orleans, communications right now is a disaster for those people. We don't have one in Canada. We could use a satellite-based communications network.

Finance committee  The number we report is that about 8% of our revenue is spent on research and development, but in truth, as I said earlier, the vast majority of the employees are working in research and development; we just get other people to pay for it. The Americans, French, Germans, Chinese, and Indians pay us to develop technology in Canada.

Finance committee  Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak on the subject. Actually, the reason we didn't come to the committee with specific numbers in mind is that we don't see this as being an issue of money being provided to an industry to do something. We view it completely differently.

Finance committee  [Inaudible--Editor]...just a small piece of it.

Finance committee  There are about 7,000 people working in this industry in Canada. Clearly they are highly skilled, with high-paid jobs. We have in Canada the highest rate of export in space industry on a global basis: about 50% of everything we do is exported. The great majority of those people are highly skilled.

Finance committee  I don't know the specific numbers, but the industry has developed over those twenty years. I'm representing industry, obviously, but to me what's more important is the fact that there are valuable and important things for Canadians to do. We're interested in Arctic sovereignty. How do we watch for that?

Finance committee  Thank you, and good morning. Bonjour. At the outset, I want to thank the members of this committee for giving us the opportunity again to participate in these important deliberations regarding upcoming budgets. My name is John Keating. I am the CEO of a company called COM-DEV.