Ottawa opens consultations on first Canadian space act

Ottawa launched public consultations on Oct. 22, 2026, on Canada’s first comprehensive space law, and released the country’s first framework for protecting the satellite positioning, navigation and timing signals that phones, banks and power grids rely on.

Industry Minister Mélanie Joly made the announcements at the SpaceBound 2026 conference in Ottawa, according to an Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada news release.

The proposed Canadian space act would modernize and streamline the rules for activities in orbit and create a single regulatory framework for Canadian outer space activities, the department said. It builds on the Canadian Space Launch Act, introduced earlier in 2026 to enable commercial space launches from Canada.

“Our government is building a strong, resilient space sector,” Joly said in the release.

The consultation, titled Legislative and Regulatory Modernization for Space Activities, runs this fall on the ISED website. The release did not give a closing date.

The second piece, the Positioning, Navigation and Timing Resilience Framework, deals with the signals from global navigation satellite systems such as GPS and Galileo. The government said those signals are used for phone navigation, ride-sharing, payment processing and fraud prevention, dispatching first responders, communications and running the power grid.

The framework sets out four areas of action: drawing on more than one source of positioning data, including ground-based systems and sensors; building sovereign dual-use capability for civilian and defence needs; encouraging investment in Canadian companies developing the technology; and improving awareness and preparedness across governments, industry and researchers.

The release attached no new dollar figure to the framework. It linked to a $15-million federal investment in Xona Space Systems Canada, announced Oct. 20, as an example of the kind of capability Ottawa wants to build.

Defence Minister David McGuinty also issued a statement on the framework, stressing that the Canadian Armed Forces depend on positioning and timing systems for Arctic sovereignty and operations with allies, the department said.

The space sector contributed $3.8 billion to Canada’s economy in 2024 and supported more than 28,000 jobs, according to figures cited by the government from the Canadian Space Agency’s State of the Canadian Space Sector report.

The push to build domestic launch and satellite capacity has drawn investors. Nova Scotia’s Maritime Launch Services recently won conditional approval to list on the TSX, and on the same day as the space announcements, Joly also unveiled a $1.75-billion venture capital plan aimed at keeping growing technology companies in Canada.

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