“The way the government does procurement in this country is not relevant or fit for the task when it comes to space. It is not agile. It does not move quickly enough.” That was the blunt assessment of Canada’s space procurement policy by panellist Major General Colin Keiver, Deputy Commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force during a July 13, 2023 Space Canada webinar.
Titled “Canada’s Space Innovators’ Contributions to National Defense | Evolving the Space Sector in Canada,” the webinar was co-hosted by Space Canada (the national space industry association) and the Policy Insights Forum. It featured domestic industry and military experts discussing the state of the Canadian satellite industry and how the federal government could support it better, based on the recent Space Canada position paper, “Innovating at Home, Defending Our Interests: Canada’s Space Innovators’ Contribution to National Defence”
The slow bureaucratic pace of the federal government’s space procurement process dominated much of the webinar’s panel discussion. In a bid to provide a fair and open buying process, “we will spend 6 to 10 years baking in requirements,” explained Major General Keiver, “and we will do so in an incredibly open and transparent manner that forces multiple companies to burn millions of dollars on multiple iterations of our RFIs and potentially RFPs to eventually down select to a winner. And by the time that winner starts building a payload for something to go into orbit, that payload is probably five to 10 years out of date.”
Speeding up the procurement process is one of the Space Canada position paper’s four recommendations. Another is having the federal government engage more directly with industry in defining Canada’s defence requirements and how to achieve them. When it comes to Ottawa spelling out the requirements of its various procurements to industry, “we go down into details that don’t need to be defined right away,” said panellist Christine Tovee CTO of Wyvern Inc., a Canadian-based geospatial data provider. “What would be really good to help industry — and especially small companies — is to tell us ‘this is what I need to do. This is what the outcome has to be.’ Don’t tell me that it has to be a box that’s four by six and it’s got three antennas.”
The Space Canada position paper also advises Ottawa to expand existing defence programs “to include increased or dedicated funding for space innovation.” But it was the paper’s fourth recommendation to establish a National Space Council chaired by the Prime Minister “to develop and orchestrate strategic space policy” that got the panellists talking.
“I think that the space council is the first crucial step” towards boosting the fortunes of the Canadian space industry, said Major General Keiver. “The one piece that’s missing in the Canadian space sector right now is that ability to lead from a national perspective and pursue national objectives.”
The US and UK have already established such space councils, added Jordan Miller, Market Lead for Global Defence at Calian Group, and they’ve given them serious clout. For instance, “they’ve brought it to the level of the Vice President [who chairs their space council] in the United States,” he said. Meanwhile, the fact that the Canadian space industry works with so many federal ministries means that its direction must be “above that where they can be coordinating what needs to happen across all departments, to get the most out of the space industrial base and the most for each department’s mandate.”