Government Operations Committee on Nov. 28th, 2024

[Jenica Atwin, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

That's excellent. That's a perfect example of how this is supposed to work. That's really great to hear.

Do you think that transferring the list of indigenous businesses away from government would address concerns, perhaps, that we're seeing with organizations such as the Métis Nation of Ontario?

[Lorne Pelletier]

Right now, there are six Red River Métis businesses on the federal indigenous business directory. They've secured some contracts in the past, but it's been limited. Some have been on that list from early days, I'll say, and have not seen contracts. Some are being directed there, as per my opening remarks, because we've introduced them to prime contractors.

In one case, we introduced a prime contractor that has three billion dollars' worth of federal defence contracting to a Red River Métis business. They're excited. They have the capability to do what they need them to do. They've said that they're ready to go into contract mode as soon as you get registered on the federal indigenous business directory, which, to me, goes against the principle that they're registered with our government's registry.

[Jenica Atwin, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

Thank you for that.

Mr. Beaton, if I could turn to you as well, I think your business sounds really incredible and is addressing some important issues, especially, as you said, in relation to some of the oppressive pieces of the Indian Act and specifically around food security and the limitations there.

Can you speak to some of the ways that your businesses helped to improve the economic activity in communities in your region?

[Jacob Beaton]

Yes, I can, absolutely. Thank you for giving me that space.

We're indigenous-led, meaning that our board, our senior staff, our medium staff and our entry-level staff are majority indigenous at every level.

In our first year, we worked in skills training, primarily in trades. I'm not an educator by background—I'm an entrepreneur—but I just saw that there were all these construction sites and all this stuff going on and we were surrounded by unemployed first nations people. Why was nobody working in these areas? I was a general contractor for a while, where I proved it could be done, just like my co-witness here.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that in our first year, we engaged more indigenous people in trades in our province than all government-funded non-indigenous institutions put together, and that was just our first year. We've grown every single year.

Now, one of the questions I didn't get asked is if I'm on the registry and if I've ever attempted to bid. The funny thing is that I used to be, but guess what? My status card expired, and that's a huge problem here. A lack of ID in rural, remote and indigenous communities is a really big problem. That's why I'm not on it.

I'm status. I'm definitely indigenous. I'm first nations. You'll find tens of thousands of people who will attest to my indigeneity and my ancestors here, yet I'm not on the registry because I have an expired status card, which is absolutely ridiculous.

Anyway, yes, the success is big. If anyone wants to check us out, our website is teacreek.ca, like the tea that you drink.

Thank you.

[Jenica Atwin, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

That's amazing. Thank you so much for that.

That's really informative as well, just to explain some of the—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

That's our time, I'm afraid. We're past our time.

[Jenica Atwin, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

I'm sorry.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Mrs. Vignola has the floor, and then we'll finish with Mr. Bachrach.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Mr. Beaton, I'm still astonished—that's the politest word I can find—to learn that an indigenous status card can expire. I'm sorry, but I think there's a problem here. It's like telling me that my birth certificate has just expired. Yet I am still alive. It's ridiculous.

You said there were enough studies. Do you sometimes get the impression that the many consultations and studies are just a way to look good in front of the cameras and to postpone truly solving problems?

Studies have been going on for 50 years. At some point, we have to grasp something and solve the problem.

Do you feel that, ultimately, this is just a pretext?

[Jacob Beaton]

Yes, I do, 100%. I think we're in agreement that, universally, studies are important, but they've been done. We have lots of data from, for example, Statistics Canada. It comes out fairly regularly.

As I said, we just need to get going. There are tons of window dressing. My experience and the experience of all the first nations we work with is that reconciliation is currently all talk and no action. We're not seeing the needle really moving in significant ways.

That's really all I have to say on it. We're ready for action. Our Métis allies there are working hard. We're working hard too. We're ready to go. We're just not having the meaningful partners on the other side, in our case, that are ready to go too.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

I want to come back to the financial levers currently in place by and for first nations.

How could the government strengthen those and ensure that they are better known by communities across Canada, regardless of their geographic location?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

I'm afraid that no time is left for a response, but we always welcome written submissions. If you'd like to provide a commentary in writing to the clerk, that would be much appreciated.

We'll go to Mr. Bachrach, please.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Beaton, as you know, I had a chance to ride the train from Prince George to Smithers a few weeks back. I was riding with a young man named Justice Moore, who shared with me how his life has been transformed by the work you're doing at Tea Creek.

I want to give this last round to you, for you to just talk about what you're doing with your operation, Tea Creek, and some of the successes you've had in terms of training and empowering local indigenous people with the skills they need to succeed.

You have two and a half minutes. Share with us the story of Tea Creek and how it's been so transformational.

[Jacob Beaton]

Thank you.

Well, I decided to put all my business experience to work in terms of trying to transform.... My vision of Tea Creek is to have healthy, resilient and indigenous economies across the country and beyond, based around abundant local food, which is our history. “Our past is our future” is how I sum up Tea Creek. That's the vision.

The nuts and bolts, then, are in retraining our people to take those places within our economy, from top to bottom. There's an excellent documentary about Tea Creek on CBC. It's on CBC Gem. Look for Tea Creek and you'll find it, if you're really interested in solutions that work and what we're doing up here.

I just want to again thank everybody very much for having us, for having me and for listening. I really do look forward to seeing some positive changes and hopefully hearing from folks on the federal side who want to see indigenous-led businesses take root and become a new standard that opens the door to more opportunities and resources that actually make a difference on the ground.

Thank you very much.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thanks so much, Mr. Beaton.

We have 30 seconds more, and I'm going to try to fit in one more question.

You talked about handing indigenous people the wheel, in that it's time for the government to really empower indigenous people when it comes to indigenous procurement.

Are the existing indigenous organizations and indigenous governing bodies sufficient to lead that work, or is there a need for the creation of new institutions, organizations or groupings to administer the process of distributing contracts and managing indigenous procurement?

[Jacob Beaton]

Well, I could—

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

We can follow up afterwards.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Mr. Beaton, I apologize. There's no time left.

As I said previously, we would really welcome a written response or some thoughts on that question.

With that, colleagues, we'll suspend and bring in our new witnesses.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

We are back. Thanks for everyone's patience. We'll go to opening statements.

Welcome back, witnesses. We're having some technical issues with Mr. Sergerie, so we're going to continue with our in-person opening statements while we try to get his IT fixed, and we'll go to him third. If we're not successful, we'll just go straight to questioning.

Mr. Carignan, would you like to go ahead for five minutes? I'm going to keep you both to five minutes and no more, please, because we're short on time as it is.

[Denis Carignan, President, PLATO Testing]

I'll be as quick as I can.

Thank you, committee, for the opportunity to come back to speak again.

I'd like to acknowledge that I was supposed to be at a different meeting today in Toronto with the Bank of Montreal's indigenous advisory council, and they gave me leave to be here today because of the importance of this subject for communities across Canada.

My name is Denis Carignan. I am president of PLATO Testing. We're an IT services company with about 400 employees across Canada.

I have to ask myself why I'm here and what I'm I presenting today, because I've presented once before, and I thought back to my mother. Her name is Leona Cyr, Leona Carignan. She went to the Lebret Indian Residential School for 12 years, along with all of her brothers and sisters. The one thing she taught me was that she acknowledged the past and recognized the past, but always looked to the future and lived in the present.

What that taught me over the course of my life was to check my intentions when presenting, and I thought to myself, “Why am I here today?” It's really so that I can present my experience as a business person in Canada, running an IT services company over the last nine years. Hopefully, some of our experiences and some of our learning can be shared and can help inform the work of this committee, because the work that you do and that the government does is important for us.

The Government of Canada is the largest purchaser of goods and services in Canada, so how it manages procurement is very important. It is very important as a policy tool to incentivize and to help make good things happen for all Canadians.

I also acknowledge, as a business person, that I can't change the policy, and that you here collectively, and the work you do in Parliament, have the power to influence and to make these changes. We're here because a previous policy was put in place almost 30 years ago, and the policy doesn't work for today's standards.

I heard some of the testimony this morning. I was very grateful to hear Lorne Pelletier, a former colleague of mine, speak with great earnestness and a lot of wisdom. I heard a lot of commonalities in the presentation this morning with what we have to say as well.

My business is technology. We work in a technology workspace. We compete globally. We work with companies across Canada, with government organizations across Canada, and collectively we've been trying to to work to build careers for indigenous Canadians in technology.

When I consider that and when I look at some of the demographics for our industry, anywhere from 0.5% to 1.5% of Canada's indigenous technology workforce is indigenous, yet there is great opportunity to grow careers.

When I look at previous work that I did as a public servant, I see that one of the challenges we have is how we diversify economies in our local communities. The nice thing about technology is that the work is portable, so if we invest the time and the energy, if we equip people with skills, then work can be brought to different parts of Canada, which can actually help diversify the work.

I have shared a document. It probably isn't through translation yet. It provides a bit of an overview of who we are as a company and of some of the impacts that we have.

One of the pages depicts a case study of our work in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. We received some funding from the Government of Canada through FedNor, through the provincial Government of Ontario and through the City of Sault Ste. Marie, totalling a little over $3 million, and that funding was provided over five years. With those organizations and with Crown corporations and a number of private corporations in Sault Ste. Marie, we've been able to develop a work centre there. To date, we've generated over $11 million in salaries and benefits to our indigenous team in that community, generating about 400 months of employment. Even as a business person or whoever, it looks to me like it's a pretty good return on investment for everyone.

When I think about it, you wouldn't necessarily think of Sault Ste. Marie as being a hub of technology or technology employment, yet with the proper investment of time, effort and incentives, we can do this in virtually every community in Canada where there is suitable and adequate infrastructure.

I will hopefully provide some recommendations to you. I know I have just a few seconds left.

The first one is to provide incentives for capacity building or building of a talent pipeline in Canada, which is very important. I think that's something that can be done inside of a renewed procurement program.

The second one is really around building business acumen. We're a company that is almost 30 years old. However, to compete on a federal government procurement project, we need to be bigger and more capable. The only way for us to scale to that is having an opportunity to lead projects, as opposed to being a subcontractor on projects.

With that, I will close. I thank you again for the opportunity.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thanks.

Welcome back, Ms. Semaganis. Thank you for making the effort to drive so far to be here again today. The floor is yours.

[Crystal Semaganis, Leader, Ghost Warrior Society]

Thank you very much.

My name is Crystal Semaganis, and I'm a leader of the Ghost Warrior Society, which is a grassroots collective. I'm wearing this shirt for a reason, because it's indicative of Inuit, first nations and Métis. That is exactly who we represent.

My involvement in this committee came as a result of my dedication to stopping first nations, Métis and Inuit identity fraud. On the specific issue of indigenous procurement, what we are doing is trying to unravel centuries of colonial interference in who we are as a people. Some of those mechanisms and frameworks—whether they be the Indian Act legislation, procurement systems or programs meant to bridge gaps that currently exist for first nations, Métis and Inuit—are flawed. We are wading through a quagmire of historical exploitations, and they are crippling my people from a grassroots perspective.

There has been much talk of data. There is a data deficit on the impact of first nations, Métis and Inuit identity fraud on our people as we experience it in our day-to-day life. It is robbing us of opportunities, resource building, capacity building, true engagement and our true place in the economies—social and otherwise—of Canadian society. We are a very capable, intelligent, resourceful, beneficial and beautiful nation. We are the first peoples. We are the stewards of our resources and mother earth, and we are here to say, “Work with us when we tell you that this business is not representative of us.”

I'm here to tell you about CPAIN. That acronym stands for Corporations Posing as Indigenous Nations. We are doing data collection among our people on how this is impacting us. Of the top 10 indigenous businesses that have done procurement in recent years, the price tag for those that are fraudulently claiming indigenous identity in order to engage in that procurement is $2,610,800,000. That figure alone could have alleviated food insecurity in the north. It could have provided clean drinking water for every first nation, Métis and Inuit person who currently does not have it. It could have alleviated child welfare problems across this country.

When you have these kinds of price tags, you look. You study the data and present it. These are the real impacts on our people. You tell us these are the colonial mechanisms that will rule us, and you do not listen to us when we tell you that these people are not indigenous. This is an exploitation of billions of dollars, and you are robbing my people of our true place in this society. We are more than capable of being your equal partner, handling natural resources and being stewards of mother earth.

We are here to say, “Enough”. The Ghost Warrior Society is not going anywhere. We are going to continue our work, and we are going to continue these relationships and opportunities to educate on the real colonial violence that is first nations, Métis and Inuit identity fraud.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you very much.

We don't have Mr. Sergerie's IT fix, so we're going ahead to see if we're able to address it.

[A voice]

It should be okay.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Oh, it may be fixed.

Mr. Sergerie, are you there?