U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra came to Space Canada’s SpaceBound conference in Gatineau last Tuesday with a message for Ottawa, one he delivered many times: Canada is making a mistake by going its own way. By the time the “fireside chat” was over, he had completed his task and inadvertently made the case for Canada’s push for sovereign space capabilities.
Hoekstra sat down for a fireside chat on space, defence and international collaboration with Beth Burke, chief executive of the Washington-based Canadian American Business Council. Burke opened by inviting him to share some thoughts, and he made three points. The first was the 67 years of space collaboration between the two countries, which he dated to 1959. The second was the U.S. vision for space, from returning to the moon to turning research into business. With the third, Canada’s role, he turned from space to politics. “Now we’re waiting for where Canada wants to go,” he said. “[The] Prime Minister [and the] minister this morning have indicated that Canada maybe sees a different future than what we do.”
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly had opened the day from the same stage at around 8:45 a.m. She said Ottawa would bring the Defence Industrial Strategy’s view of space as a sovereign capability to the Canadian Space Agency, and that on space and telecommunications, “any approach must be about protecting and enhancing our own sovereignty.”
“Canada wants to go somewhere else. That is a sovereign issue for Canada to decide,” Hoekstra continued. “We’re talking to people around the world, we’ve got lots of people that want to partner with the United States, that will work with us in space… If it’s not Canada, the space will be filled. There are some folks out there that bring tremendous capabilities and expertise that are more than eager to partner with the United States.”
When Hoekstra says “Canada wants to go somewhere else,” he isn’t talking about the moon. Canada has been an all-in Artemis partner for years, and spent money on a Lunar Gateway the U.S. unilaterally shelved after politely telling its partners it had changed plans mid-stream. That’s partly why Canada is hedging.
Burke asked how decades of co-operation in orbit could help the two countries through “the complicated moments” on Earth. Hoekstra spent the next three minutes on tariffs. “From our perspective, number one, we’re not in a trade war,” he said. “We’re negotiating some tariffs.” A year and a half ago, he added, Canada “had the best deal in the world. I don’t know whether that’s still in effect.” He moved on to the president’s trip to China and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s talks with India before Burke cut in: “Back to space.”
I watched the audience while he spoke. People were shaking their heads, and the applause at the end was brief and polite. Afterwards, some of the people I talked to laughed about it. Others said they felt insulted. SpaceQ’s report on the session has the full account of what he said.
The SpaceX thread
Burke later asked about national security and how the two countries work together through NORAD and their space agencies. Hoekstra worked through NORAD, NATO spending and Greenland before coming back to space, and to Canada’s plans to do more with the European Space Agency. “Okay, that’s fine, great,” he said. Then he started to speak about Elon Musk.
“‘We’re not gonna rely on SpaceX.’ Actually, you’re closing the market to SpaceX,” he said. “Canada is really saying, for all the investment, all the innovation, all the excellence that is being driven by Elon, we don’t want to be a part of it. I think Elon will probably find other people that he can do business with, and my guess is that he already is.”
As with other statements, Hoekstra didn’t provide much context. It was a “huh” moment. He was most likely referring to what Prime Minister Mark Carney said in September. Asked by Ezra Klein in an interview with The New York Times how Canada balances its dependence on technologies like Starlink, Carney answered: “Starlink we will diversify away from, no question.” He named Telesat’s Lightspeed constellation as the alternative, a way to “cut that dependency, which has in certain circumstances been turned on and off in a way that was not sovereign to the actors in the conflict.”
Here’s what Hoekstra didn’t mention, and may not know, given how thin his grasp of the space sector seemed.
Starlink is still sold across Canada, and WestJet uses it. And the constellation Carney named as the alternative is itself a SpaceX customer. Telesat booked 14 Falcon 9 launches for Lightspeed in 2023. When its 225 satellites reach orbit, SpaceX will have launched more Canadian satellites than all the Canadian satellites that came before them, active and retired, combined.
Starlink’s biggest business is home broadband; SpaceX counted 13.6 million consumer subscribers at the end of September. Telesat doesn’t sell to consumers at all. Lightspeed will be a fraction of Starlink’s size, built for airlines, ships, telecom carriers, governments and, now, defence. Carney’s alternative competes less with Starlink than with Starshield, the secure military version of Starlink that SpaceX provides to the U.S. government.
Telesat has been working toward its low Earth orbit constellation for about a decade, long before sovereignty became Ottawa’s latest buzzword. Its first filing with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, in 2016, said the constellation could serve government and military users, and by 2020 Telesat was running exercises with the U.S. Air Force. Canada’s defence money came later. In March, Telesat set aside a quarter of Lightspeed’s capacity for military Ka-band, radio frequencies reserved for armed forces. In August, the Defence Investment Agency awarded it a contract initially worth $2.3 billion to carry secure military communications across the Arctic. That program has been in the works in one form or another for well over 10 years. Its second phase, a separate medium Earth orbit constellation with MDA Space as prime contractor and Telesat as a subcontractor, is in contract talks.
Asked for his advice to the industry, Hoekstra said: “I know that there are some countries that are going to be working on replicating and building the capability that already exists, and it’s kind of like, great, go for it, okay? You know, you’ve got people that have done that. They can come in and they can build it for you and you’ll be all set up.”
He made that offer a week after Ukraine learned what it means when someone else owns the capability.
Starshield, Musk and trust
Ukrainian forces lost speed on their Starlink and Starshield terminals around Oct. 13 and 14, with no warning, and drone missions failed, according to Ukrainian officials. On Oct. 14, Musk posted that Starshield systems “are owned and controlled by the US government,” and that “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”
The Wall Street Journal then reported that Musk ordered the slowdown himself. In Mumbai on Oct. 21, Rubio told reporters, “I’m not aware that we knew about this decision beforehand. But that’s irrelevant,” adding that it was governed by “a private commercial contract,” Reuters reported. On Oct. 24, as speeds were restored, Musk offered a different explanation. “Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people,” he wrote. “That loophole was closed last week.”
Whatever the terms of service say, Musk slowed a military service Ukraine depended on in the middle of a war. Washington says it didn’t know. That one private citizen could make that call on his own is ridiculous. In defence, trust is paramount, and Musk broke it.
When Carney told the Times in September that Starlink had been “turned on and off in a way that was not sovereign to the actors in the conflict,” he was pointing to Ukraine’s earlier experience. In 2022, Musk refused to extend Starlink coverage to Crimea for a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s fleet at Sevastopol, saying he didn’t want SpaceX complicit in “a major act of war.” Weeks after Carney spoke, it happened again.
Hoekstra held up Musk’s “excellence” from the SpaceBound stage on Oct. 20, a week after Ukraine’s terminals slowed. That’s hardly an endorsement anyone should follow.
The ambassador made Canada’s case
Hoekstra closed with a pitch. “If you’re looking for somebody to partner with and be successful in 10, 15, 20 years, I would invite you to seriously consider whether that might be the United States of America,” he said. Partnering with the U.S. “has been good for both of us,” he added, and that was the message the room should carry, “as that idea is under attack here in Canada.” Then: “My last controversial statement today.”
His message, which had little to do with space, came across as part pressure, part insult, part laughable. What he failed to realize, or didn’t care to understand, is that here was an audience that has worked for decades in alignment with major U.S. space programs, and still does. That’s why his messaging was so off.
He came to tell Canada it was making a mistake. Over half an hour, he made the case for why Ottawa is right. He said the U.S. will plan around Canada if it has to. He praised Musk, the man who had throttled Ukraine’s military communications a week earlier. And he brushed off countries building their own capabilities as “replicating” what already exists.
Earlier, after his remarks on SpaceX, he had explained Washington’s thinking: “When the Canadian government speaks on some of these issues, we take it as that’s what they said they’re going to do. We’ve got to take them at their word. So we’ve got to plan alternatively.”
Ottawa should do the same, and plan alternatively.