Red tape threatens satellite industry

Years of federal bureaucratic delay may cost the North millions of dollars in investment in an emerging high-tech industry.

A Norwegian company has been waiting since 2016 for Ottawa to grant an operating licence for a satellite ground receiving station in Inuvik, N.W.T. The delay has limited services that the company can provide to increasingly restive clients, and its partner is considering moving.

“We’re quite frustrated with the pace of the Canadian bureaucracy,” said Rolf Skatteboe, president of Norway-based Kongsberg Satellite Services, or KSAT.

Inuvik, on the northern tip of the Northwest Territories, is considered a prime location for receiving stations for Earthobservation satellites. The first station was built there in the mid-2000s by the federal government for RADARSAT, its own Earth-observation satellite.

Since then, such satellites have become privatized. A 2017 industry report estimated global revenues from Earth-observation satellites at $100 billion a year, growing at 11 per cent.

Inuvik got into the game in 2015, when KSAT came to town.

KSAT had won a contract from the European Space Agency to receive data from Sentinel satellites, the agency’s premier environmental monitoring program. The company needed receiving stations to complement its installations in Norway’s Svalbard area.

“We looked for a place in Alaska, but since we knew there was ongoing activity in Inuvik, we decided to support the satellite business there,” Skatteboe said.

KSAT — with partner Planet, based in California — has seven satellite-reading antennas in Inuvik and plans for three more, for a total investment of $50 million.

For reasons including national security, satellite receiving stations must be federally licensed under the Remote Sensing Space Systems Act.

But a report from the McGill Institute of Air and Space Law says that legislation, written when only governments launched satellites, has become outdated.

“This industry is really evolving very quickly,” said Aram Kerkonian, who helped write the report.

The act is too restrictive, the report says. It recommends licences be streamlined for ground stations that receive data and send it out untouched. It also says Global Affairs Canada staff on the file are under-resourced.

Despite interventions from the Norwegian ambassador and pleas to Global Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, the licences still aren’t there.

The government is doing its best, spokesperson Amy Mills said in an email.

“We are aware that this is an important issue both to the company and to the local community, and we work to complete the review process as quickly as possible.”