Chapter 2 - Minister and Canadians Agree with the Concept

Chapter 3 - Tom Meets with CSA President and Special Assistant

The Special Assistant started the meeting by explaining that she wanted the results of the meeting kept "confidential and between us".  Tom did not accept this request and explained that the interest on the part of Canadians was too great at that point to keep the results of the meeting secret.  He then gave the Special Assistant copies of many of the e-mails he had received from people across Canada expressing support for the idea that the agency use the sp/ss arguments.  Tom also explained that he would put the minutes of the meeting on the Internet. 

Despite some initial skepticism from his listeners, Tom succeeded in convincing the Special Assistant and the President that using the sp/ss arguments in the agency's communications strategy made sense and the CSA's Director of Communications (then a different individual to now) was assigned the job of meeting with Tom and working out a plan to make this actually happen. 

Chapter 4 - Communications Director Stalls

Unfortunately, the promised meeting did not occur and so, months later, Tom finally used the newsgroups again to publicize the government's lack of action in the affair.  As a result, the Comm Director finally did contact Tom by e-mail.   However, over the next few weeks, it became apparent that the Comm Director didn't really want to do anything along the lines of that promised by the President and advised by the Minister.  He would take forever to answer simple communications from Tom.  He would arrange the meeting with no warning and at times when Tom had already explained he was not available.  He would cancel the meeting at the last minute.  Finally, once the meeting was arranged, he refused to confirm an agenda for the get-together.  

When the meeting finally did occur, Tom started out by complimenting the Director on the fact that his staff seemed very enthusiastic that he had been appointed to the position.  Tom said that the Director must be very experienced in space communications indeed to have such support from his subordinates.  The Director nonchalantly replied that, no, he had no background in the space field but had been working in pulp and paper.  In addition,  the director did not seem to properly understand his role at this point.  Instead of speaking about strategies for publicizing the sp/ss issues, he debated them with Tom and the only conclusion that came from the meeting was that the director promised to consider the possibility of incorporating the sp/ss arguments into agency communications strategies and get back to Tom soon.