GATINEAU, Que. — Space Canada’s SpaceBound included a wide-ranging panel Wednesday on Canada’s North, including opportunities and challenges. A selection of the key points is included here, although given the sensitive nature of northern and Indigenous affairs, there is always more to be said on any of these points and it is best to interface with the participants directly to get more insight.

The panelists included:

Challenges in the Arctic

  • Zubko: Regulation, power costs ($1 per kilowatt-hour for commercial businesses) and communications (50 times costs of customers in other jurisdictions). “It’s very, very difficult to be competitive with those three major issues on the table, but we keep fighting.”
  • Cornfield: Repairing fibre lines across about 1,150 km of terrain prone to grizzly-bear interference: “Grizzly bears like to steal our markers to play with with their cups.”
  • Redfern: Power costs ($2 per kilowatt-hour for government to provide it), a need for sensors on subsea fibre networks, internet quality, and fewer backups (she cited an incident (2011) in which a Telesat satellite was unavailable and “the whole entire northern part of Canada went black.”)
  • Power: Less competition that leads to higher prices (said SpaceX Starlink is helpful, but alternatives would be best) and less infrastructure in the Arctic compared with other nations such as Norway and Denmark. “It adds significant cost and problems for us to be able to work in the Arctic,” he said of some of these issues.

Domain awareness:

  • Redfern: Paid tribute to the 5,000 Rangers that operate in the North, who are “not enough” but who act as “eyes and ears on the ground” after satellites pick up something that requires attention. Added that increasing skillsets, replacing aging Rangers (many are over 50) and adding technology would be beneficial.
  • Power: Said speed is improving, but accessibility is an issue because satellite images from RCM — while helpful — could use a more open-access approach similar to the European Space Agency. Added that in sharing urgent information with communities, Facebook is the most viable network.
  • Zubko: Said alternatives to Starlink are “very limited,” with the Amazon Leo or European IRIS² systems being a possible help in a few years.
  • Cornfield: Mentioned the Canada North Fibre Loop, a joint effort of the Yukon and Northwest Territories governments and Northwestel. During a large wildfire, the Mackenzie Valley Fibre Link was not available for a month because “nobody could get anywhere close to where the actual break was.” While fibre access has improved since then, more would be helpful in the coming years to increase resilience.

Opportunities and space strategy in the Arctic

  • Redfern said there is increasing “Indigenous participation in the telecommunications sector” compared with about 10 years ago, but the concern is companies historically are not interested in “truly partnering” with communities beyond a customer relationship. The United States, she said, has a national Indigenous telecommunications office that “provides information to Indigenous peoples if they’re interested in understanding they’ve got right a first refusal on spectrum,” she noted. Her hope is that speed and cost will continue to improve, as often investments have not resulted in meaningful changes on either metric.

Space strategy

  • Zubko said he would like to see the government address the costs of power, telecommunications and food for the 130,000+ people within northern Canada.
  • Redfern said that it’s important “to ensure that we do not tokenize Indigenous participation, and that we are appropriately provided the skills and the ability to actually run and manage and participate not only in constructing the infrastructure that’s needed, but running the infrastructure.”
  • Cornfield said there are now two fibres available on each side of the Arctic, but she would like to see a third one added — as well as a strategy for protecting it.
  • Power called for more investment in satellite image distribution.

Is SpaceQ's Associate Editor as well as a business and science reporter, researcher and consultant. She recently received her Ph.D. from the University of North Dakota and is communications Instructor instructor at Algonquin College.

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