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Canada's government has denied, downplayed, minimized and manufactured confusion about its sales of space-based surveillance.
To regain preferential treatment for its corporate friends in the war industry, the Canadian government continues to negotiate treaties that allow the U.S. military access to Earth-observation data from Canada's cutting-edge satellite technology. A Privatized Cone of SilenceShortly after RADARSAT-1's launch in 1995, the Canadian government bestowed the satellite's marketing and sales rights to a Vancouver-based private firm, MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates (MDA). Control of RADARSAT-1's image sales to American clients was given to American company Orbimage. When privatized both MDA and Orbimage were owned by U.S. rocket-maker Orbital Sciences. Perhaps most troubling, Canadian Members of Parliament (MPs) who voted the approval for the government's privatization contracts were prevented from viewing those volumninous agreements. A senior legal bureaucrat, Bruce Mann, ruled that "it would not be in the public's interest" to allow MPs to see the privatization contracts because doing so might lead to "material or financial loss" for MDA or negatively "affect their competitive position." And so seven Liberal and Conservative MPs ganged up to outvote the three New Democratic Party (NDP) and Bloc Quebecois (BQ) members who demanded to see the privatization documents. Secret Canada-U.S. TreatyArticle 3 of the 2000 bilateral treaty between Canada and the U.S. says "Canada agrees to implement controls... set forth in Annex II hereto, which is protected as commercially confidential, with regard to the operator of RADARSAT-2." Shades of the privatization contracts, Members of Parliament (MPs) on the approval committee were never allowed to read the contents of Annex II. Instead a Foreign Affairs' bureaucrat briefed MPs on Annex II who passed the treaty without actually seeing the Annex's detailed text. According to international law professor Michael Byers, the U.S. could have secured unilateral power to conscript Canada's RADARSAT data in support of American intelligence and military operations. Who knows? Annex II could even enable the U.S. to demand RADARSAT-2 be used to take images in preparation for a military intervention to which Canada was opposed or which was illegal under international law. The culmination of Canada's satellite trade deals with the U.S. is Bill C-25 (the RADARSAT Bill) that passed into law on November 25, 2005 just before the last federal election. Bill C-25 puts Canada in sync with George W. Bush's "National Space Policy Review" which increases the use of commercial satellites by U.S. military and intelligence agencies. And The Winners Are...As discussed in the article Canada's Secret War Exports, Canada's space-based satellite data has been a boon to coalition military and intelligence agencies. Over the past 10 years, MDA's annual revenues have increased from $109 million to almost $1 billion today. Canada-U.S. trade agreements have special exemptions to allow government subsidies to "defense" industries like MDA. Thus Canada's government has donated at least $43 million to MDA through defense productivity and technology partnership programs. And the company is highly profitable: MDA earnings per share rose from 23 cents in 1996 to about $2 this fiscal year. In 2000, David Emerson was on MDA's board of directors when the federal government gave $167 million to MDA in additional funding for RADARSAT-2. Emerson is now in an even more powerful political role as Canada's Minister of International Trade under the Conservative government. Previously Emerson was the Liberals' "pro-missile defense" Minister of Industry. Watching the WatchersWhat Canadian taxpayers need is a publicly-accessible surveillance system that clearly reports the hidden agendas that lurk behind Canada's secret satellite agreements. Apparently traditional news reporting is not working. Sources: www.mdacorporation.com, www.sedar.com, and with permission from Press for Conversion! of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT); The Propeace Community Site
The copyright of the article Spy Satellites for Sale in International Trade is owned by Daniel Workman. Permission to republish Spy Satellites for Sale in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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