> Many Canadian aerospace engineers have never forgiven the government for dismantling Avro Canada’s CF-105 Arrow, a billion-dollar project that, on October 4, 1957—the same day that Russia sent the world’s first satellite into orbit—rolled out the fastest supersonic jet the world had ever seen.
Not just aerospace engineers, but if you ask just about any Canadian and we're all still super sour about this.
It's probably a great thing for Canada that the Avro project was shut down. The real tragedy was the CSeries/Airbus A220.
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...
My first comment on this site was about Bombardier.
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.
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).
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.
For more context on how big a deal this is, the A220 is quite widely seen as the future of short-haul aviation. Airlines are moving towards a point-to-point model instead of hub & spoke (especially in Europe), using smaller planes with lower capacity, but flying more frequently, together with best in class fuel efficiency (with the price of jet fuel only really going to go in one direction in the next decades) means the 220 is very, very popular. Airbus is expecting to sell 7,000 of them in the next 20 years. That's coming close to the incredibly successful A320 family (including A318, A319, A320 and A321 models) which has sold just over 10,000 planes since 1986.
You are correct. The Arrow in fact had a long list of problems: it was extremely difficult to fly, it guzzled fuel so had limited range, it was fast as hell but had very limited maneuverability, etc. I know someone that put a lot of research into the decision, and as massive a fan of the Arrow that he was, he came to the conclusion that its cancellation was the right call in the end.
Genuine question: do you believe that the immediate bow to Trump's tariffs had anything to do with the context of the `Two Michaels` and attempting to gain favour with the US amidst the political tension that Canada was in with China at the time?
At the time it was puzzling to me why Trudeau was so submissive regarding China. He bowed down to the CCP and wasn't able to secure the `Two Michaels` release. In retrospect, that might have been because of the double allegiances the Trudeau cabinet held toward China [0] [1].
He did a great job for Boeing's shareholders (me included) and the CCP. Just, not for the Canadian public it seems!
"Since first launch, though, Canadians haven’t been unanimously proud of the Canadarm. In 1995, Royal Canadian Air Farce poked fun at it with a sketch about one breaking."
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.
It's on the back of the $5 note (the arm that is, not Air Farce). I've only ever heard it discussed in positive terms. I have no idea how a single sketch was extrapolated to "not all Canadians are proud of it". Not a very well thought out take.
Dozens of former Avro Air employees got jobs at NASA and were key to the Apollo program too. Owen Maynard probably being the highest profile but there may be others. He was involved in the engineering of the Lunar Module aka LEM.
"Apollo" by Murray and Cox is a wonderful book on the engineering history of Apollo that covers this in some detail. One of the best popular engineering (and engineering management) books I've ever read, along with other HN favorites like Ignition!, Soul of a New Machine, Masters of Doom, etc. Highly recommended.
I remember the first time I visited the Kennedy Space Center, some twenty years ago. There was a mockup of a Shuttle, which we could walk through. When the Canadarm mockup came into view, I teared up.
People sometimes mistake our self-deprecation for a lack of pride. They are incorrect.
Lots of comments about Avro Arrow here lool. As a Canadian, I'm both proud and saddened by the fact that although we have elite engineering talent, that talent tends to be drained to the US.
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.
This was an opportunity for Canadian VCs/Investors/Gov to invest heavily on AI talent. This isn't what happened; the majority of capital continues to flow to real state. Lacking investment, banks acqui-hired promising talent/startups, those remaining went to the US and now the AI industry in Canada is on life support.
Is there proof that we have "elite engineering talent" and that's why it gets drained? Or is it the fact that we have engineering talent on par with the USA but the USA is willing to pay them more because they have a larger need for engineers?
I think the parent comment is suggesting that "engineering talent on par with the USA" == "elite engineering talent". In my anecdotal evidence, I'd estimate that ~1/3 of my Canadian engineering graduating class are now in the US, either working or researching at US institutions, with most of these folks representing the top 1/3 of the class.
Can confirm. Just graduated, and a significant chunk of my cohort is going or is planning to go south.
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.
There's a catch with that strategy - need a Canadian operation or they have a big administrative overhead to keeping you on board. Remote pay question marks too.
IME most places will take you on as a contractor or use a PEO. If they're open to remote they'll find a way. Canadians are so cheap it's still worth the overhead
Something you have to keep in mind is that there are two parallel markets over there: SV caliber developers and the rest. The former won't have any issue getting a job in the US (takes maybe a week for a talented engineer to get one). Therefore, comp has to be priced appropriately. The later can't -and likely won't ever be able to- secure a US visa, mostly due to skills. A lot of them are immigrants to Canada themselves (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.
For software developers your comment is correct. If you’re a Canadian citizen and a professional engineer all you need to get a TN visa is a job offer. There is a path to get both citizenship and a professional engineering title for foreign engineers so eventually the engineers with an engineering degree can make it to the US.
>In my anecdotal evidence, I'd estimate that ~1/3 of my Canadian engineering graduating class are now in the US, either working or researching at US institutions, with most of these folks representing the top 1/3 of the class.
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.
Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of Canadians expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Canadians could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?).
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.
> 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.
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.
>Even though Canada conceived of the arms, branded them with its national flag, and named them after itself
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.
The maple leaf is a convenient and evocative symbol, but I don't think many people care about the flag itself. The symbol and the flag are distinct entities, at least in my mind. And it's definitely not present in every company's logos.
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.
Spend an hour driving through Canada on the way to the US, cross the border, and drive for another hour, and you will be disabused of that notion.
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.
I don't think Canada is particularly nationalistic compared to other countries. Many Canadian subsidiaries of US Corporations put a maple leaf on their logo to specifically distinguish it from the US company, for example McDonald's Canada has a maple leaf. But it's not universal, and it's probably more common to use the unaltered American logo (see Walmart Canada, Costco Canada, Whole Foods Canada, UHAUL Canada, etc). The purpose it serves is not really one of nationalism but similar to how Canadian companies use the .ca domain vs the .com domain.
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.
We use the flag to mean "made in Canada" and we use it in an international context to indicate Canadian goods & assets - which, in my opinion, is what flags are meant for.
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.
See it quite a bit (more than I ever do in the USA) on lawns, cars, and clothing in Metro Vancouver / Lower Mainland BC. The US flag is common in some areas of the US and uncommon in others. So far it seems like its somewhat similar in Canada.
When we compare the opportunity that space tech provides to that of both Avro and Blackberry, the question to me is how have the incentives changed? Culturally, we have an attachment to K-selection over r-selection of companies, meaning that instead of creating the conditions for an ecosystem of competitors to thrive, the CDN governments pick winners and turn them into state codependents who are surprised to lose to more agile companies who came up through competition. We're the talent, but not the money.
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.
> Whereas the first arm looked and functioned quite literally like an arm mounted at the shoulder, the Canadarm2 was like two arms connected to one elbow. This configuration would eventually allow it to move along rails running the length of the ISS, making it a 1,500-kilogram multi tool for the space station—a crane, grabber, and camera, all in one.
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.
49 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadPrevious German word that received the same award : kotzen
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-...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65054559
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.
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.
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.
Context for those wondering wtf a heritage minute is https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes
Superman: https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/superman
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.
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.