Carney Names Jeremy Hansen as Space Adviser as Canada Looks to Europe
Prime Minister Mark Carney has appointed Jeremy Hansen as a special adviser on space, CBC reports — a move that lands as the United States takes note of Canada's efforts to shift its space partnerships toward Europe. The job, as Hansen describes it, means advising Carney and Industry Minister Mélanie Joly.
Joly said Hansen proposed helping the government develop a new space strategy when he left the Canadian Space Agency.
The backdrop is a two-way drift: Canada wants to expand co-operation with European countries in space, while Washington has warned it could look for partners other than Canada for its space missions.
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Hoekstra's read on all this is worth pinning down: he told the SpaceBound 2026 conference, where Joly also spoke, that Canada has decided to move away from SpaceX, and pointed to Canada saying it will take a look at the European Space Agency and do more with it. That sounds less like a signed divorce than a country keeping its options open while an ambassador reads the tealeaves out loud.
The new adviser's recent itinerary complicates the clean-break story: in April, Hansen and three other astronauts travelled around the moon on Artemis II, further out into space than any humans before them. Whatever the strategy ends up saying about partnership, he is not arriving at the file cold.