Telesat

Uh, his government, though, did privatize several Crown assets.

Yeah, he doesn't probably, in, in toll, the CN Rail, and Petro-Canada, and Canadair, and Telesat, all sorts of things that were, at the time, a de Havilland Aero- I mean, things that were very close to people's hearts.

And so I do wonder, you know, how, how you feel, given that outside experience, how you feel about this pitch from the current prime minister.

The, based on what we know, is it a good idea?

This change in procurement means that industry is now becoming more of a partner rather than a vendor when it comes to military capabilities.

So in this particular case, for instance, Telesat is going to be a critical component of the communications network and infrastructure for the Canadian Armed Forces.

Hi, and welcome to the Vanguard Podcast.

I'm Steve Ladorante, the editor of Vanguard Magazine.

I'm with Michael Adamson.

He's Telesat's Director of Defense Strategy and Business Development.

He's responsible for expanding and executing the company's go-to-market and business development strategy for the Telesat LightSpeed Low Earth Orbit Network, that's a mouthful, with an emphasis on Canada, the US, and allied nations.

Prior to joining Telesat, he had a decorated career in the Canadian Department of National Defense, most recently serving as the inaugural commander of the Canadian Armed Forces Three Canadian Space Division and the Joint Force Space Component Commander, working with Canadian and allied partner stakeholders to operationalize the space domain, I think that just means space, and determine CAF space operations requirements.

The federal government needs to make sure that over the long term it's going to have, uh, the f- the, the fiscal strength to be able to support this additional spending.

Mark Carney made the announcement at the Global Investment Summit in Toronto, where Canadian CEOs are pitching big projects across energy, mining, and technology, like Telesat's Dan Goldberg.

We are investing about $7 billion to build a advanced global, uh, low-earth orbit satellite constellation.

Uh, you can think about it as an alternative to Starlink.

The West Wind offshore wind and transmission facility in Nova Scotia, $44 billion.

There's Telesat Lightspeed-

Yeah

... $5.2 billion.

But a final instantiation of this architecture will certainly be integrations with space assets, comms.

I mean, we just invested, Canada did as a government, in Telesat, a $2 billion deal to increase communications for military operations with its own sort of sovereign LEO orbit.

We're experimenting with drones.

We've got a program called Overwatch.

It's about getting satellites into space.

If you wanna get a satellite into space, even in Canada, they, we've given so much money to Telesat, and who do they say? "Who you gonna call?" How are you gonna get that satellite into space? "Well, we call SpaceX." [laughs] Right? Doug Ford's like, "We don't wanna use, we don't wanna use Starlink or SpaceX." Just like, "Okay.

Don't tell Doug." [laughs] Right? Don't tell Doug.

Ian and I talk about this all the time.

I mean, they're kind of I guess they're kind of doing that with Starshield with the U.S., But aside from that, I mean, it's kind of hard to walk back the idea that Starlink Mobile is looking to compete with every MNO globally, right? And so I've talked about this dynamic where because Starlink has pursued global spectrum and they want to compete with the MNOs and for the few that...

been suckered into working with them god bless um you know they're gonna get they're they're they're working on their their own demise but um for foreign regulators uh it's gonna be really a really tough pill to swallow to enable starlight to come into your country and compete directly with your national champions right and so that's where um this whole idea of for example the two gigahertz uh spectrum allocation in europe um People aren't talking about this just yet, but, you know, obviously Starlink is angling to get a 10 by 10 megahertz block, but there's no guarantee that they'll get that, right? And that, by the way, you know, currently the current holders are EchoStar and Telesat.

Sorry, not EchoStar and Viasat.

And so the expectation is that, well, EchoStar will just get a 10 by 10 allocation down from their 15 by 15.