The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has released its annual Departmental Results Report for the fiscal year 2019-20. The CSA spent $324.4 million of a planned $328.9 million with an underspend of around $4.5 million. That’s a good result considering their past performance, and fits a pattern over the last three years of spending within 1.5%, plus or minus, of its intended planned spending.
Open but not transparent enough
I’ve said this before and it’s worth repeating, under the Liberal government, access to government to ask questions and get answers has improved. However, transparency still remains an issue as it was under the previous Conservative government. A clear example are these reports.
Where once these reports included a breakdown of spending, we now have a list of priorities followed by results. Those results include dollar figures, sometimes in the aggregate, and over more than one fiscal year. The government will tell you these reports were crafted by the civil service as a whole-of-government effort to better provide information on how each department is performing. I would counter that it makes it easier for their narrative. They simplify department results to talk about their priorities and then the achieved results. What’s missing is depth and a breakdown by program.
Canadian Space Agency results
The Space Technology Development Program (STDP) is an important program for the CSA. It’s designed to foster technology innovation. It’s the first item discussed in Result 1: Space research and development advances science and technology.
According to the report “the CSA launched another wave of the STDP with an investment totalling $18M over three years.” Then a little further down they say “Through the STDP, the CSA also invested a similar amount of $18.8M to support the advancement of 55 commercially promising technologies in various space domains.” And in the next paragraph they then state “STDP also contributed to LEAP (Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program.”
Sounds like a lot, right. But does it say how much of the annual $20 million STDP budget was actually spent in the FY2019-20? No. Sure, numbers are bandied about, but no actual number for the reporting year is mentioned. What we do now is that $23.5 million was spent as part of the CSA’s Class Grant and Contribution Program to Support Research, Awareness and Learning in Space Science and Technology. That information is provided in the Supplementary Information Tables as an aggregate, but there’s no breakdown of these figures. The STPD funding includes grants and contributions.
There is one mystery in the Result 1 section. It concerns the Business Expenditures on Research and Development (BERD) metric the government now tracks for every department.
The report states that “through these investments, the CSA contributed to Canada maintaining its Business Expenditures on Research and Development (BERD) in the space sector. In 2018 (the most recent data available), BERD reached $356M, which is much higher than the expected target of $250M. This variance is due to the CSA using a five-year rolling average to set the target based on the fluctuations of the Canadian space sector over time as missions proceed through their lifecycles. Another factor in this variance is the presence of a company, which recently entered the Canadian space sector, that has reported significant BERD in the past two years.”
Who is this mysterious company that’s made such a contribution? Feel free to comment on this story as to who you think it is. We’re also researching this one.
In Result 2: Canadians engage with space, the most interesting news is that the CSA has postponed a consultation with industry and academia “to address common challenges.” Those challenges include “attracting new people and organizations into the space sector and renew a talented and skilled Canadian workforce.” The reason is because the CSA intends “to modernize its engagement and consultations mechanisms over the next year.”
There are some other aspects of the report we intend to analyze in future articles.