Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It's good to be back at this committee.
Thanks to our witnesses for shedding light on this issue we're studying.
I'm really pleased to have Mr. Beaton here, from northwest B.C., as someone who has a lot of experience as an indigenous business person and has thought a lot about this question of how we ensure indigenous businesses are getting more opportunities and that we're addressing some of the real injustices in indigenous procurement that have persisted for a long time, as he mentioned in his opening remarks.
I know, Mr. Beaton, that when you got to the solutions part, you ran out of time a little bit. I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about your proposals when it comes to fixing the shortcomings you listed. Perhaps you could focus in on these questions around the pragmatic issues of defining what an indigenous business is and the idea of “For Indigenous, By Indigenous”, which I think is really crucial in addressing the problems we've seen in the indigenous procurement system.
I'm happy to give you the remaining minutes to expand on those ideas and to help the committee understand where we go from here.