The Globe and Mail December 31, 2002
Ottawa asks for weapons monitors in space
By GRAEME SMITHThe federal government has asked the Canadian Space Agency to find ways of monitoring outer space for illegal military weapons, documents show.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade made the request as part of a planning study conducted for the space agency last summer.
The Globe and Mail obtained a copy of the study through the Access to Information Act.
Similar monitoring efforts were abandoned more than a decade ago.
However, experts say the issue of military activity in space has renewed urgency now that the United States has announced plans to build a missile shield starting in 2004.
The space agency's former president, Mac Evans, who led the planning exercise, said that the CSA won't necessarily fulfill the request by Foreign Affairs or any of the 18 other federal departments and agencies that submitted ideas for space projects.
But if the space agency accepts the proposal, Mr. Evans said, it would revive a space program called PAXSAT which envisioned a network of satellites that could detect nuclear, kinetic and beam weapons orbiting the Earth.
U.S. President George W. Bush recently ordered his military to install the first phase of a missile shield, nicknamed "Son of Star Wars," because it could include space-based components. Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham has warned that putting weapons in space could be "illegal."
At the moment, however, experts say Canada doesn't have enough surveillance technology to verify whether the U.S. program violates any of the few international treaties that govern space.
"We should have some kind of independence," said Ram Jakhu, a professor at McGill University's Institute of Air and Space Law. "Developing our own technology is very important."
But researching ways of detecting space weapons is a long-term project, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org in Washington, because at the moment there are few arms agreements to enforce. Only nuclear arms, antiballistic missiles, and antisatellite weapons are explicitly forbidden by current international treaties, and many of the agreements are weak.
Arms control is one of dozens of ways that federal officials suggested Canada's space technology should be used over the next seven years. Their ideas are collected in a 40-page document.
In the document, the Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Emergency Preparedness inquired about scanning urban centres to build three-dimensional computer models of downtown areas.
Transport Canada requested satellite imagery to detect dangerous substances and protect the border. And the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency wanted to visually track cargo and monitor "port facilities, targets of interest, smuggling, staging areas, and high-risk routes."
But Canada's space agency is so underfunded that it would need twice its current budget of $300-million to accommodate all the federal departments' requests, said Marc Boucher, CEO of the space industry Web site SpaceRef.
"Based on their current budget, they can't do much," Mr. Boucher said from Victoria.
Copyright © 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc.
