Bob Dechert, Member of the Canadian Parliament for Mississauga–Erindale, on behalf of the Honourable Tony Clement, Minister of Industry, has confirmed $200 million in funding for the Strategic Aerospace and Defence Initiative (SADI) and announced a $7.6-million repayable investment in support of a research and development (R&D) project being undertaken by PCI Geomatics to develop nexgen earth observation technologies. The R&D project at PCI Geomatics will involve developing a high-speed computing framework and software suite that will make it possible to process large amounts of raw satellite image data faster and more cost-effectively, with an emphasis on increasing the automation of image processing. The resulting data are essential for decision making in many fields, including environmental monitoring, agriculture, security and intelligence, aerospace and defence, and wide-area surveillance. SADI supports strategic industrial research and pre-competitive development projects in the aerospace, defence, space and security industries and is managed by the Industrial Technologies Office, a special operating agency of Industry Canada with a mandate to advance leading-edge research and development by Canadian industries.