Canada’s Big Flex in Space
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
The author, although Canadian, is missing Canadian culture here. Air Farce (a satarical Canadian news show) poking fun at something Canadian does mean we are proud of it. That's Canadian, self deprecating humour, poking fun at ourselves.
Growing up in Canada, anytime space was mentioned, the Canadarm was front and centre. We are very proud of our contributions.
Next up from the walrus: An expose of strange comments from the Honourable Member of Parliament for Kicking Horse Pass.
https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/hist...
People sometimes mistake our self-deprecation for a lack of pride. They are incorrect.
It's a mix of a cultural naivety about economics and a business establishment who do just fine with a few banks and the natural resource sector - as why risk investing in early stage anything when that money is safer in bank stocks and extractive industries? Canada doesn't really benefit from space tech either, as the economics of space exploration are about mineral exploitation, which is Canada's stock in trade, and asteroid mining is a direct competition to our strip mining the north.
Our R&D tax breaks skew the incentives to achieve the opposite of their intent, where some of the work on the research does get done here, but the resulting IP, revenue, and market cap gets owned by US parent entities. They use Canada as an engineering maquiladora for cheap and directly subsidized labour. An actual competitive policy would reward investment and growth of an ecosystem and not merely subsidize the piecework toil that investment pays for. We could collect from a greater number of M&A windfalls instead of just skimming income tax revenue off software developers as well.
However our politics are too hobbit-like to create a serious venture ecosystem, so sure, some people will use the relative comfort of the country to produce some space tech, but I don't see the case for investing in space tech here when you can invest in more favourable markets and just use our cheap engineering talent to get you to your exit. Canada is mainly services firms that don't produce any IP or durable or acquirable value. A lot of people say it's broken, but the other thing about this place is that it's almost never broken, it just works for someone you can't see.
> They use Canada as an engineering maquiladora for cheap and directly subsidized labour.
This is the absolute best description of Canada I’ve come across. Sad, but 100% accurate.
Side note, just a couple decades after the Arrow, Canadian researchers once again lead the world, but this time in the field of AI, specifically deep learning. However, what happened after that? Google hired Geoffrey Hinton, and the industrial might of the US took over.
Perhaps this is inevitable given that we are much weaker economically compared to the US.
However, one last thought is that, aerospace vs software is not the same. For aerospace, yea I think you need a giant super power of a nation to keep it alive. However, software can be built by one guy in a garage. I'm not sure why Canada just let its dominance in AI "slip away".
Also side side note about Avro Arrow, is it just a weird naming coincidence that the two Apache projects exists: Avro and Arrow? I think Avro is named after the original British Avro company. However, I don't think Arrow has anything to do with aviation.
Could be that Canadian software engineers prefer to move to the US to make much better money.
Mind, I don't get the impression that they want to stay in the states. I include myself in that camp, the plan eventually being to work remote for an American company from Canada.
Similarly, in a IEEE survey of scientists from 16 countries <http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...>, the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two. If you are a Canadian scientist, there is a 16% chance <https://np.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37lgxg/the_...> that you will move to the US. That's not "16% of all Canadian scientists that move out of the country move to the US". Let me repeat: 16% of *all* Canadian scientists move to the US. As you noted, they're also likely to be among the top Canadian scientists, too.
By comparison, 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada, so about 1.6-1.7% total. Since the US has nine times more people, that means that in absolute numbers the 1.7% of American scientists is about equal to the 16% of Canadian scientists, but there is no reason to think that the 1.7% makes up the top tier of American scientists; why would the best move north of the border? In other words, the US is receiving the best of Canadian scientists in exchange for an equal number of its non-best.
Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and its Universities were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent.
Canada sure had a lot of "talent" immigrate in the meantime, but from my observations it's mostly people who can't -and likely won't ever be able to- secure a US visa, mostly due to skills (there's a reason they immigrated to Canada, it's way easier and the quotas are close to 10x per capita compared to the US). Some companies leverage this and have floors of international devs they park in Canada for a fraction of their US counterpart through a subsidiary.
It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for Canadian nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US.
I can't find the article now, but the well-publicized crash of Canadian immigration's website on US election day 2016 was actually because of maintenance, not because hordes of Americans hoping to flee north overwhelmed the site.
>Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower"
This was repeated so often that it became a punchline in /r/canada.
>Some companies leverage this and have floors of international devs they park in Canada for a fraction of their US counterpart through a subsidiary.
My understanding is that this is the norm for FAANG offices in Canada: Mostly non-North American people who are either waiting for a US visa or (as you said) can't get one, plus the odd Canadian who wants to stay home for family or personal reasons.
Not for these AI models. The deciding factor seems to be the resources you can throw at it in training.
Not just aerospace engineers, but if you ask just about any Canadian and we're all still super sour about this.
The Avro was a cool paper project (it is ultimately unknown if it could even achieve the projected performance since no flights were performed anywhere close to the claimed speeds or with real hardware). The Avro didn't serve any purpose, it was rendered obsolete by ICBMs and 50's soviet technology. The plane was made to intercept a nuclear supersonic soviet bomber that... never materialized! The soviets and Americans went all-in with ICBMs, rendering bombers pretty much obsolete (by Sputnik launch it became obvious nuclear payloads would be delivered with ballistic missiles). Would have been a costly, useless plane.
The A220 was a complete airliner project with a production line and $52 billion dollars worth of firm orders as of 2020. When the Trump administration slapped tariffs on it Trudeau immediately bowed down, despite the tariffs later being thrown out in courts. All he did was to basically threaten to not buy Boeing fighter jets and instead get f35 from Lockheed (which he was contractually obligated to anyways). No support for the industry, nothing. And that was for a flagship prestige technological project.
All he had to do was to be a little bit more assertive and make a capital injection at the right time. Bombardier was swimming in orders, it was guaranteed that the project was going to make money at this point (plane was even certified by the FAA by then).
I still don't understand why he reacted so submissively to Trump. Having the CSeries sold to Airbus at a huge discount was foolish: The plane already had a profitable amount of orders. Canadians paid for the R&D, Europeans and Americans are now reaping the benefits.
While there was very little the Canadian government could do to save the Arrow, other than maybe building it as a training aircraft, it was 100% possible for the Government to save Bombardier and the A220 program. I wonder if the fact that the company is headquartered in Quebec made it politically impossible...
Bombardier went into high-risk, high-reward territory, and failed:
1) project they'd never done before
2) technology they'd never used to build and model
3) highly integrated supply-chain with large number of partners delivering large sub-components that had to integrate with other large sub-components
4) pre-planned delivery dates to customers, and still had at least two delivery slips
5) "bet the farm"
Additionally, the C-suite was comprised of nepotistic family connections--who may have been fully qualified, or may have only achieved their role due to the family ownership.
Political conjecture aside, this is a engineering and business failure.
I think this is missing the point. Avro Arrow was a single design, but it was first in many respects. Shutting it down ended not just what the Arrow could have been, but the entire future of what Avro's future could have been.
The engines alone were spectacular. The concentration of talent was impressive. 1/2 of Avro (it is often said) went to work for NASA. We had that talent, and bam, gone.
Mostly because the US wanted its industries to sell planes to Canada instead.
But yes, that 300% tariff was bullshit and I'm sure its effect didn't pan out the way it was expected.
He did a great job for Boeing's shareholders (me included) and the CCP. Just, not for the Canadian public it seems!
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/9658738/trudeau-foundation-china-...
I think the author may have missed or misunderstood one of my favorite features of Canadarm2: it's symmetrical!
The same mechanical/power/data connection (PDGF) on the end of the arm that grabs payloads is used to connect the base to ISS. The ISS has multiple PDGF points around the station, so it can bend over, grab onto the station with the end-of-arm-tool gripper, release the base of the arm, and walk itself end-over-end like an inchworm.
The Mobile Transporter/Base System/Servicing System do allow the arm to move along the main truss, but I think the end-over-end mode is way cooler.
Context for those wondering wtf a heritage minute is https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes
Superman: https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/superman
Yet more proof of how Canadians are far more flag-obsessed than Americans. Similarly, the maple leaf appears in the logo/signage of every single company in Canada, including Canadian subsidiaries of US companies.
If Canada had a full space program of its own, we'd see red-and-white Canashuttles (named Anne Murray, Rush, Gordon Lightfoot, and Margaret Atwood) launching from Cape Canadaveral in Labrador.
Displaying the flag anywhere other than at the end of a real flag pole has sort of become co-opted by the alt-right "freedumb" movement as of late.
Something you can do in lots of places.
Americans are OBSESSED with the flag to a degree Canadians are not.
In terms of national symbols, maybe the Maple Leaf is present in a lot of places, but what you fail to remember is that the American equivalent is a "star" - of the "stars and stripes" or the colours red white and blue.
Try to find me an international American symbol (in space or otherwise) that doesn't have a star, a stripe, or red-white-and-blue, and you'll see it's equally ubiquitous for them.
As other commenters point out, you really can't compare how flag-obsessed Canadians are to Americans. Just driving across the boarder from Vancouver into Washington and you immediately see larger than life flags which are really uncommon here. And when you do see a Canadian flag it is often accompanied by an American one.
What you won't see is people putting flags on their lawns, on their cars, on their clothes or anything like that. The exception is tourist stores, which are full of flags, but you won't see Canadians shopping there.