On October 5, 2017, MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) announced that it was changing the name it had held since its eponymous founders, John S. MacDonald and the late Vern Dettwiler, created the venture in the basement of MacDonald's Vancouver home in 1968. MDA would thenceforward be known by the more typically corporate moniker of Maxar Technologies (NYSE: MAXR). Jocelyn Wills's excellent history of MDA was published just before this perfect moment of closure, which, in Wills's casting, came to conclude the third era of MDA's innovative but always insecure and fraught history as a distinctly Canadian aerospace corporation increasingly integrated into a global neoliberal surveillance capitalist system. The arrival of Maxar bears out all of what Wills argues in this dense and tightly woven tale.
In many ways the story of MDA as Maxar looks like one that makes many Canadians uncomfortable: the role of both the Canadian government and Canadian industry in supporting U.S. imperial hegemony and, in this particular case, the militarization of orbital space and its transformation into a space of surveillance (and potentially war-fighting) operations. This process, ongoing since the early Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union began to compete to seize this ultimate high ground, went through several phases, some of which were obvious to the public and others less so. However, Wills's telling of the story of MDA complicates things in a productive way: on the one hand, it confirms some things we thought we knew about Canada's defense industry, and on the other hand, it punctures the simple story of a Canadian company forced to go, cap in hand, to the American military.
Wills's periodization is based on the internal business dynamics of MDA—near bankruptcies, aggressive new strategies, and redirections; however, these internal dynamics and the corporate history that resulted are clearly reflective of wider political economic transformations. Like many companies that started in or after the late 1960s (and one can think of most of Silicon Valley here), MDA seemed a naïve and hopeful venture by brilliant but very unbusinesslike founders and, like many such businesses, produced much that was innovative but was unable to fully capitalize on these innovations, lurching from manufacturing crisis to liquidity crisis to management crisis and back again. As Wills remarks early in the book, “demonstrating a capability is one thing, building a large and complicated . . . system, quite another” (p. 93). MDA came up with many brilliant plans—from airline information and dispatch software, through a competitor to IBM's emerging business computing system, to viable synthetic aperture radar (SAR)—but was bedevilled by, among other things, a lack of international credibility, frequent cost overruns, and the argument that frequently leads to early crisis in firms: whether to retain the vision and control of the founders or seek salvation in external funding. By the end of the 1970s, MDA was trying to do too much with too little. This lack of a coherent focus was exacerbated by a political economic climate that had shifted away from postwar recovery to the oil shock and the successive crises that followed. The answer was what Wills refers to as the “intensifying neoliberal project”: retrenchment, downsizing, and offshoring combined with a rollback of state investment (p. 165).
For MDA, the immediate result was its takeover by John Pitts, who was very much a Bay Street man, with his MBA from Harvard and hard-fighting business reputation. He brought restructuring, investors, and a new manufacturing vision to MDA. The 1980s saw new opportunities created by Ronald Reagan's “second Cold War” militarism, with Canada's Prime Minister Brian Mulroney tagging along behind, and major civilian space projects, represented by the International Space Station (ISS), in which Canada (and MDA) would play a small but significant part. MDA and Canada experienced a “deepening integration into an increasingly globalized military-industrial complex,” typified by the U.S. Air Force's Automated Weather Distribution System (AWDS), a contract that began a long-lasting relationship between MDA and the Florida-based Harris Corporation, and the Radarsat program (p. 270). Once again, though, there were crises involving patent disputes, spin-off companies like Kinetic Sciences, Inc. that never really spun off, a failed takeover bid by longtime domestic rival SPAR, and eventually a liquidity crisis that led to the only possible alternative to selling up: public listing.
By this time, the Soviet Union had collapsed, Reagan and Mulroney were long gone, and policy analysts were declaring things like a global “peace dividend” and, even more presumptuously, “the end of history.” The era of big budgets and big deals seemed to be over: Pitts was kicked upstairs and, in the spirit of a seemingly new era in the wake of the Rio Earth Summit, MDA cofounder, John MacDonald, was talking not about weapons systems but about environmental sustainability. In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that the public listing was disappointing. However, with world peace (and the end of history) remaining elusive, U.S.-Canadian military cooperation continuing, and surveillance increasingly the answer to everything, prospects for a company with MDA's diverse portfolio of interests were good. Luck also played a part, allowing MDA to avoid significant damage from the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Just before the worst, MDA was acquired by U.S. firm, Orbital Systems, and in 1995 a new CEO, Dan Friedmann, was appointed. MDA's improved financial position allowed it to profit from the woes of long-term suitor SPAR, vacuuming up its lucrative and media-friendly Canadarm space robotics division. Orbital's solution to the dot-com crisis was to divest itself of MDA, a move that ended up benefiting both.
MDA's directors were able to use what they had learned under Orbital's management to exploit the American surge in military and surveillance spending following 9/11, and the company finally became a major player in earth observation and geospatial information. However, its new significance meant MDA's business decisions were now matters of Canadian national security, and a proposed sell-off of parts of its core business to the U.S.-based Alliant Techsystems Inc. (ATK) was blocked by the government in 2008. This was an ambivalent spark of national assertiveness, and it is not clear whether what followed was a “victory” for Canadian security interests and industry or merely confirmed Canada's subservience to American power. In late 2012, MDA acquired a major Palo Alto–based American satellite builder, Space Systems/Loral (SSL). However, in 2016, Friedmann was out; the former CEO of Harris Corporation, Howard Lance, replaced him and shifted MDA's HQ to Silicon Valley. Some victory. As Wills concludes, somewhat ironically after over 350 pages of detailed history of personalities, projects, deals, and disasters, “This study of surveillance capitalism was never about individuals and the choices that they made. In the end, Canada's trajectory and MDA's history reveal that individuals, whether policymakers, industrialists or workers, are products and components of the larger structures they serve” (p. 354).
The name of Maxar, the corporation formerly known as MDA, appears to have been perfectly chosen to reflect the conclusion of this fascinating book: the name erases its own history and reveals nothing of its function in the era of homogenizing global capitalism and planetary computing and surveillance.
