Thanks, Ms. Thompson.
In my role as the vice-president of entrepreneurship and procurement, I have a number of roles at CCAB. The one that's most relevant to today's hearing is “Supply Change”. Supply Change is CCAB's trademarked indigenous procurement strategy, which we started in 2018. This strategy aims to increase indigenous participation in all buying entities within Canada—not just the federal government, but all levels of government and corporate Canada.
We have a number of different pillars within that strategy that bring indigenous businesses together with buyers. We have aboriginal procurement champions, who currently have 117 corporations in all sectors and industries across the country that have signed on to help us increase participation with indigenous businesses within their supply chains, either directly or indirectly.
We also provide learning experiences for our certified indigenous businesses. As Ray talked about with some of the programs they do, we have also done some of that stuff with indigenous businesses as they try to navigate federal procurement.
On the previous question about what would get more indigenous businesses on the directory, it would be simplifying the procurement process for procurement within the federal government. Small businesses, indigenous businesses, do not have the capacity or the resources to respond to these overwhelmingly admin-heavy RFPs that the federal government does.
Again, we are very focused on bringing our indigenous businesses to the rest of Canada to ensure they're included.