There are a number of channels through which we have direct conversations with indigenous businesses. We have Procurement Assistance Canada, which does a lot of outreach to small businesses and is trying to understand what their challenges are within the procurement processes, and what kinds of supports and aids they can offer.
On the bonding piece, I'm very well aware of the challenges with bonding, section 89. In fact, we are about to launch some new measures on bonding to look at raising the size of projects that would require bonding so that we can create more space for unbonded transactions, which will open up space for indigenous businesses. We're also looking at more targeted projects that would have an opportunity for indigenous participation and looking at whether we would need to have bonding on an optionality basis.
Another channel is that we have quite a long-standing relationship with the National Aboriginal Capital Corporations Association. They will often bring to us what they are hearing in the marketplace and what kinds of challenges they are seeing in the procurement space.
As well, we work with Indigenous Services Canada and with the National Indigenous Economic Development Board. That's another venue for us to understand what some of the indigenous business and economic development challenges are and how they may interface with procurement, and to figure out how we might be able to improve it.
The last thing I would say is that we are working constantly on things such as indigenous participation plans. In the live procurement processes, we will have discussions with indigenous communities to see if the way we're approaching indigenous participation plans actually works, if it is effective and if it is driving those benefits.