Optimistic, confident, and upbeat about Canada’s space prospects: These words aptly sum up the mood of Space Canada Horizons conference during the opening session of this one-day event in Ottawa May 1, 2024. The space industry hosted Horizons at the city’s Bayview Yards building, before a standing room only crowd.
The positive mood was struck during the opening remarks of Space Canada CEO Brian Gallant, and for good reason. “The commitment of the federal government laid out in the recently tabled budget to create a National Space Council will be an important development for the Canadian space ecosystem,” Gallant explained. “ The National Space Council will ensure the federal government has a whole of government approach to space and position Canada at the forefront of the new space economy. It will also help us continue that momentum.”
The usefulness of the National Space Council for coordinating Canadian government and industry space efforts was underlined by Stéphanie Durand, the Canadian Space Agency’s Vice-President of Space Program Policy. “The National Space Council will enable greater coherence and the level of collaboration required to address complex crosscutting issues that span commercial, civil and defence space domains,” she said. “We’ll also help to further promote innovation and resilience in Canada space sector, as well as facilitate collaboration with many of you in the room with industry, academia, as well as other key stakeholders in the growing space economy.”
A necessary dose of political reality was subsequently administered by Scott Millar, Assistant Deputy Minister of Horizontal Policy with the Department of National Defence. “It will be really important that the National Space Council is not just another committee that government has stepped up to look at an issue,” he said. Specifically, to ensure the Council’s success, the federal government will have to get serious about working closely with the Canadian space industry, and integrating public and private space efforts into a coherent whole. “We’d appreciate hearing from your thoughts about how such integration could happen,” said Millar.
B.Gen. Mike Adamson, Commander of the RCAF’s 3 Canadian Space Division, closed the opening sessions with some sobering thoughts about the ongoing militarization of space. “We see other nation states that are using space not just for commercial and scientific gains, but to advance their own military capabilities,” he said. “That is a concern because, in a military operation standpoint, we are absolutely reliant on things like GPS, SATCOM, and those kinds of things to conduct operations. As I pointed out to the parliamentarians this week, that same GPS signal is the one that allows the Uber Eats driver to find the door when they’re getting really hungry in the evening, or get Amazon deliveries or first responders to find the heart attack victim.”
This is why the security of the space domain is as much a civil/commercial concern as it is a military priority, B.Gen Adamson concluded. “It’s not just a defence issue, because it’s not just a defence problem.”