Government Operations Committee on Jan. 30th, 2018

[Virginia Flood]

I'll answer the first part of the question and I might get back to you on more. As we started working more and more with the aboriginal communities—if you look at the chart that we provided—our successes were over quite a while and it wasn't until we started shifting to being more collaborative that we started seeing real results. If you're telling people how to do it and you think you know best, you're probably not going to get the best reaction. If you want to have relationships built on trust and respect, you have to demonstrate trust and respect, and that means being collaborative and being good at listening.

It was part of that learning experience, because it's very easy to come in as a big company and think you know best. You know what? We had to suck it up a little and say we needed to have a different approach. A few people who were very much behind the scenes were saying that Suncor was not doing what we needed to do, that we needed to change the way we did things.

I'll give my colleague Arlene Strom huge kudos, because she was one of the ones who was behind developing the social goal, as well as getting all of us on board and bringing us together so we understood how we had to change our behaviours, and how we were working with the communities to have better success. I think we see those results.

[Howard McIntyre]

To answer the second question, on incentives, no, we have not been offered or received any incentives to do business with or hire any particular groups.

[Virginia Flood]

I would say one thing from our point of view in the resource sector, that there's a lot of great work happening in this sector. It's not well known, and we're not really good at speaking about it.

My background from the mining side basically taught me that you're 200 kilometres from any aboriginal community when you're in a resource sector. The idea is to find some way for government and industry to work together to accelerate that and to increase the bar. We're only known as our lowest performer, and that's part of what we're trying to do, to say “raise the bar”. We think there is also a role for government to be working with us, whether it's through associations or business, and really looking at business practices.

There is a good story here. There are real successes that are happening in this space, and government working with business and aboriginal communities in a much more collaborative space would be advantageous for all of us.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

The last question was, how many of the aboriginal entrepreneurs you work with or employ are women?

[Howard McIntyre]

First of all, I don't have the exact number. I would say not enough, and I would also suggest that among the companies I've seen that try to do business with us, only a very small proportion of their senior leaders or owners are woman. There's lots of opportunity in that area.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Thank you. I'm wondering whether you could share your best practices with other businesses, so they can learn how to engage indigenous communities and entrepreneurs. Perhaps there is an intersectionality between NWAC and other businesses, so that they can understand how the system works, because your training and the way you reach out is really good.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you for being here. It's been extremely informative, and I'm sure very helpful, for our committee as we pursue this study. Should you wish to provide our committee with any additional information you think would be helpful to our ongoing study, please submit it directly to the clerk. We would appreciate that.

I want to thank you all for being here once again, and particularly Mr. McIntyre and Ms. Flood. Really, your comments on the culture of Suncor being one of commitment rather than compliance speak volumes to the type of corporate citizenship you exhibit, and we congratulate you for that.

Colleagues, we'll suspend for just a few moments and come back for committee business in about two or three minutes.

[Proceedings continue in camera]