Evidence of meeting #111 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was company.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:10 p.m.
President, FoxWise Technologies Inc.
Yes. How about we run our businesses? It's hard enough. Let's run the businesses. I don't know if we're supposed to pull together organizations to fight or push for indigenous procurement.
12:10 p.m.
Conservative
12:10 p.m.
Executive Vice-President, Corporate, Seven Generations Energy Ltd.
I just want to say that in the private sector, of course we don't have any real direct involvement with PSAB, but where we do have large projects.... I mentioned the logging example earlier, and helping to grow that business. One of the things we did was that after we set out the RFP for the entire project, we broke it up into sections. That was so we could encourage indigenous businesses that may not have the capacity to do the full-sized project to still participate. We did end up breaking it out that way so we could engage and directly benefit those businesses.
12:15 p.m.
Conservative
Bev Shipley Conservative Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON
That comes out under the joint approach. You're building the partnerships.
12:15 p.m.
Executive Vice-President, Corporate, Seven Generations Energy Ltd.
Right. Exactly.
12:15 p.m.
Conservative
12:15 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Des Nedhe Development
From the resource perspective, they want indigenous business playing in a bigger space, right? They don't want to bear all the risk of indigenous companies making 88% of their revenue off the resource industry, because when the market does go down, just like in the uranium market, the community gets impacted.
You're trying to create pockets of economic development, and if it wasn't for the resource industry, where would indigenous business really be? The banking institutions do hardly anything for indigenous business and the telecommunications sector does hardly anything for indigenous business, so they say that if the government can increase that bubble of spending on indigenous business, it takes risk off the resource sector.
12:15 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer and General Counsel, Gitpo Storms Corporation, As an Individual
Can I just say something about that?
12:15 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer and General Counsel, Gitpo Storms Corporation, As an Individual
I'm just going to follow up on what Mr. Willy said. I've been around the block here for quite a while. Obviously my colleagues have been around quite a bit. We've had some pretty interesting interactions with deputy ministers, ministers, chiefs of staff, and there has to be a will. If there's a will, there's a way to move it. Echoing this gentleman's comments, it's frustrating when someone tells you that you have to band together.
I want to highlight another good example that could have occurred. I used to be on the board of directors at CBC. By being on the inside, I was able to get them at least to do a procurement policy that dealt with aboriginal people. It was a modest one. Whatever their budget was, they were able to open it up to $1.3 million to $3 million at the time, but that was huge.
Still, you had to be on the inside. I had to talk to the CFO at the time and explain how this works.
12:15 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut it off there.
We'll now go to Madam Ratansi for five minutes.
Go ahead, please.
12:15 p.m.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you all for being here. You've really given us a lot of information.
Some of you have provided us with written submissions. I'm wondering if we could get them from others. There were some wonderful presentations, and we do not want to misinterpret your words, so those of you who haven't given us your presentations can do it.
As I am listening to most of the interventions, it seems that PSAB, the mandate of which was to increase federal procurement from indigenous-owned businesses, is not really functioning that well.
Mr. Willy, we got these four points from you. I'd like to see whether, in your opinion, the PSAB should be moved out of INAC and back into PSPC, and whether the governance structure would improve if we instituted those four points.
Then I'll have a question for you, Mr. Christmas.
12:15 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Des Nedhe Development
In my opinion, putting it in INAC puts a focus on indigenous business. You are carving off all the small opportunities in the bucket when PSPC is handling all the procurement. I would rather see it as part of the mainstream and see a target driven down for accountability, with compensation tied to that target. If you look at all the mining companies, you see that they succeed because there are targets within all of these companies. If you had it within the mainstream of procurement and you created.... We've tried to go through the system with Procurement Canada running the process while each department is championing its own procurement items. You would have to somehow create an interdepartmental group, a working group within government, to make sure these targets were met, see what could be achieved, and then follow up to put those reports out as to how success is measured and how we could improve this.
12:20 p.m.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
Your four points you gave were to impose department incentives, to create competition mechanisms and processes for success, to prevent and halt corporate fronts, and to remove barriers to entry. If those four themes were instituted and procurement was moved out of INAC to PSPC, what other venues or what other governance structure would enable the indigenous communities to bid successfully and win bids? I think there is always a comfort zone in going to suppliers we know rather than going to somebody else.
12:20 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Des Nedhe Development
We think that with our recommendations, we'll get there. You have to set targets and you have to make people accountable to those targets. When you put targets in, there are going to be a number of non-indigenous firms that want to partner with aboriginal companies. I think the audit system is already there, within PSAB, so you could follow up. Add a little more scrutiny to the audit. As my friend Bernd Christmas points out, go out and see these companies. I really think the biggest misunderstanding is that Ottawa does not understand the breadth and depth of indigenous business in this country. We have organizations like the CCAB, or you can go and talk to the Mining Association of Canada or the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, and they will tell you that the breadth and depth of indigenous business right now is at its highest point ever.
As for the barriers to entry, there is a little one with defence spending. Just put a multiplier in there. The defence industry puts multipliers on cybersecurity, renewable power, SMEs, and regional appropriations for their value propositions. If the most important relationship the current government has is with indigenous peoples, then there should be some sort of multiplier in the department that spends the most money.
12:20 p.m.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
Mr. Christmas, you talked about the American system, where they have set aside.... There is the Native American minority—
12:20 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer and General Counsel, Gitpo Storms Corporation, As an Individual
Supplier....
12:20 p.m.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
—supplier opportunities. How would that intersect...? If we were to change the environment from INAC to PSPC, would that be beneficial?
12:20 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer and General Counsel, Gitpo Storms Corporation, As an Individual
It would be beneficial, and it just reinforces what Mr. Willy is saying. It creates accountability. It tells companies that they have to do business with indigenous communities. It opens up opportunities that were never there before.
I know you guys have only so much time, but a really good example happened on Wall Street. You heard about all of the companies that got bailouts on banks, and the government then told them to show it how they were going to do business with Native Americans. They all said, “what? There is no Native American brokerage house.” The Morongo band of Indians in Palm Beach took advantage of that and opened their first Wall Street brokerage firm. Fannie Mae, Citicorp, all those big banks were forced to give them deals. Boom, they were then able to buy—and this is all documented—the Wesson gun company, a multi-billion-dollar company, and it led to other opportunities. That's an example of how this works.
12:20 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you very much.
You may want to follow up, Mr. McCauley. It's your call, but it's your turn for five minutes.
12:20 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Mr. Willy, you said it was, I think, 0.46% or something along those lines. You said you got that through access to information. Would you be able to share that with the committee rather than forcing us to wait a year?
12:20 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Des Nedhe Development
I can talk to my team and see what I can share and what I can't . We want to use this, so I'll get back to you on that.
12:20 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
If you've done an ATIP request, it's public information. It just saves us having to—
12:20 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Des Nedhe Development
That was 0.4. I'll share the ATIP I got with you.