Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time today with the hon. member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands—Rideau Lakes. I want to begin where we should always begin, with judgment. Archibald Lampman, a Canadian poet who worked right here in Ottawa, once wrote, “The pulse of the great machine goes on forever, dead and blind, and no voice or sound of human will disturbs its deep and ceaseless grind.” The reason I share this is because Canadians are watching the decision about Maritime Launch Services in such bewilderment. They are asking if this is an actual attempt at Canadian space sovereignty or something else altogether. Many who have looked into this decision closely have questions. The more they look and the more they research, the more this looks like a decision that was hastily made and that just happens to support well-connected Liberal insiders and lobbyists surrounding Maritime Launch Services. The Liberal members will stand in this House and argue this $200-million expenditure is a necessary investment to secure Canada’s place in a global space economy. They will justify this spending, just as Liberals always justify deficit spending, to grow the economy, meet the moment, invest in our future and protect our sovereignty. We have heard it all before, over and over again, with the superclusters, the SDTC green slush fund, planting billions of trees and subsidizing EV battery plants. I could go on and on. Liberals will always find new ways to burn tax dollars on projects that benefit Liberal friends and insiders, but these projects always fizzle out and leave nothing but debt and unanswered questions behind. Let us look at the so-called space sovereignty spending, the $20 million in this allocation. If this was truly a national investment, we would, of course, be building a national asset. As an example, when Norway decided it needed its own sovereign launch capacity, it acted with the discipline of a sovereign state. It built its own infrastructure, it owns the land, it owns the pad and it owns the capability. It has an asset directly under its control. Who owns NASA? The people of the United States through the U.S. government. Who will own Maritime Launch Services, the spaceport that we are talking about? This is where it gets a tad murky. At the present time, online information suggests that 26% of the ownership is held by individuals, close to 12% is listed as institutional owners and the remaining balance of 60% is unknown. This is for a national asset, something that the Liberals tell us is necessary for our space sovereignty. In other words, the Liberals are doing the exact opposite of what other democratic countries are doing when it comes to protecting and creating space sovereignty. This means we are not building a true national asset. Instead, we are building a private company’s balance sheet. We are paying $200 million for the privilege of using a facility we do not own, under terms that strip away our sovereign leverage and hand it to a private entity. That is the difference between acquiring an asset and assuming an obligation. They are not the same thing. Make no mistake, this is giving away public tax dollars to create private equity, a scheme that a Brookfield investor would no doubt approve of. The government claims this is about growing the economy, yet the math reveals a different reality. This is not a market player; it is a public dependency. When 97% of a company’s revenue is derived from a single taxpayer-funded contract, that is not a commercial enterprise. That is a ward of the state. We are told that this is a burgeoning spaceport, yet look at the reality at Spaceport Nova Scotia this week. We are being asked to cheer for suborbital test flights that generate zero revenue and serve only as public relations demonstrations for a foreign firm. In this case, we have a launch happening very soon with T-Minus Engineering testing their technology on our soil. Who is T-Minus Engineering? It is a privately held Dutch company. The government’s position relies on the claim that we are buying capability, but are we really? How can this Liberal government claim to be buying capability when the regulatory framework to govern that very capability does not even yet exist? Now, the Minister of Transport had admitted in this House that we needed Bill C-28, the Canadian space launch act, to establish a proper framework. Meanwhile, the Liberals are bypassing the legislative process, stretching the outdated Aeronautics Act to fit rocket science and pushing the machine forward without the very safety, environmental and financial guards they admit are necessary. Let me just say this again. Two foreign-owned, Dutch Barracuda rockets will be tested suborbitally, and they are paying no revenue to Maritime Launch Services. Through public disclosure, we can see that this is, again, a company 90% of whose revenue is from one single contract with the Government of Canada. The government claims this arrangement protects the national interest, but it is also ignoring that with these tests it is putting on right now and the launch pad, the Government of Canada bears the ultimate legal and financial liability. As proposed within Bill C-28, the minister gets to pick what private operators are indemnified and what public taxpayers will pay in case of a catastrophic accident or spill over the ocean. Those things do happen. This would fall on the Government of Canada. Again, if these rockets fail, cause damage or contaminate our water, the responsibility does not reside with the public firm, which is the Dutch company I was mentioning, nor with MLS itself, but with the Canadian taxpayer. We are socializing the risk of catastrophic failure while privatizing the potential gain for shareholders and lobbyists. Let me address now the financial absurdity at the heart of this deal. The provincial government lets this land for roughly $13,500 per year, yet, through this federal agreement, Maritime Launch Services receives $55,000 every single day of the year. This is not an investment. This is an excessive, indefensible transfer of wealth. While the public carries the liability, the corporate structure shows all the hallmarks of a venture designed to enrich the insiders rather than to launch satellites. We have seen massive share dilution, with hundreds of millions of shares issued while insiders reduce their own exposure. The Liberals have been totally silent about this. This is not how a healthy, productive market behaves. This is an inversion of market principles, where the government is using public money to insulate a company from the rigours of competition, or from the risks that come from the business itself. The government’s position is that we must pay this price to play this game. My position is that we are paying a premium so private corporations like MLS can play the game. Some might ask why Conservatives are not ambitious enough, why we are not for the type of investment this represents for our space sovereignty. Well, ambition is not the issue here. We all want a robust Canadian space sector, but ambition without discipline is a policy of failure. By the government’s own test, the capability is not demonstrated. The value is not realized. Ownership is absent, and the risk is entirely public. This is not an investment. This is an obligation with downside exposure. Canadians are paying up front, bearing the risk and carrying the liability for a capability that does not yet exist. We are being asked to trust the great machine as it grinds onward, indifferent to the taxpayer. As Conservatives, we refuse to participate in this gamble with other people’s money. For these reasons, we cannot support this allocation. Again, I would just remind the government that this is not a case of problem and solution, where the problem is a lack of space sovereignty and the solution is MLS. This solution has been imposed on the Canadian taxpayer. Conservatives will not support it, and we will fight against a government that puts its own needs and those of insiders before our sovereign ability to advance this field in a proper fashion.
