Evidence of meeting #50 for Indigenous and Northern Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was communities.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Vice-President, Aboriginal Services, MNP LLP
Seeing that my competitors are here and we're competing....
Vice-President, Aboriginal Services, MNP LLP
What we're doing, as I mentioned earlier, is supporting the Martin Family Initiative. I have over 35 team members, and we're expanding that to about 50, mentoring high school students to encourage them to get through to high school and then encouraging them, most importantly, to look at business and finance careers. We're supporting every single chapter of AFOA Canada, as well as the national chapter, and we submit to The Journal of Aboriginal Management, or JAM. What I've now realized is that we need to promote accounting and math—those related subjects in school—to junior high school students to expose them to it. When they're making a decision going into grade 10, they need to take their grade 10 10 so that when they go for a BComm after their high school is done, they are able to get into business and finance.
Rob can talk about some of the games we've developed for the youth.
Director, Aboriginal Services, MNP LLP
Briefly, we deliver financial literacy programming in the school system. We've delivered it at elementary, middle school, and high school levels, where we do both the literacy piece but also encourage people to explore this as an avenue of a profession where many are not exposed to it. In our communities, that's often the challenge: there's no exposure. Through this, they see people such as ourselves who come from those communities and are in these kinds of jobs. We do a lot of outreach into the university and college systems. We have a fairly large workforce of aboriginal people inside our company as a whole. Those are some of the things we try to do.
Liberal
Don Rusnak Liberal Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
I'm absolutely thrilled that you guys are involved in the Martin Aboriginal Education Initiative. I was myself. It is a great program.
Partner, Consulting, BDO Canada
Not dissimilar to our competitors, we're also involved in the Martin Family Initiative, AFOA, and The Journal of Aboriginal Management.
We've started to have conversations to work at the high school level in a lot of the same opportunities that they talked about. In addition, we've initiated a $30,000 scholarship at the University of Ottawa for business students. It's a pilot this year and we're hoping that coupled with an internship it will be able to help grow things from the bottom up.
Liberal
Don Rusnak Liberal Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
One of the questions that I want to get to, which I was talking about with my colleague Mr. Massé, relates to something that I think Mr. Norris had said, that your firm, MNP, is no longer involved in third-party management and why the company made that choice.
Then I'll ask BDO why it's still involved in it.
Vice-President, Aboriginal Services, MNP LLP
We recognized several years ago that, of the 175 communities we work with, only five are in some form of intervention, co-management, or third-party management. We have two current third-party arrangements that we're transitioning out; they're going to the default process this summer.
We just recognize and thought that this is not the best alternative for what we're trying to do on a long-term basis for our business. We want to work on the larger projects and some of the exciting things on the economic development side. In my opinion, because of the relationship and how it starts from inception, there's no way any service provider can continue with something positive. We just said, enough, we can focus our limited resources on developing a solution. That's what we've been working forward to and that's what we're putting out April 1 with the technologies that exist under cloud accounting, but layered into that is a capacity and training program that is as more important than the technology. Technology is not the solution; it's the training, the capacity development under the individual learning plans and the community learning plans that we've put forward in our platform. That's why we're getting out and transitioning into an alternative.
Partner, Consulting, BDO Canada
With regard to intervention, when I started 20 years ago, less than 20% of my staff was aboriginal; currently, over 55% is. Of the 55%, among of the staff who work with all the individuals involved in the intervention engagements, all of them come from the various communities we participated with in boosting the capacity, in order to leave a certain amount of residual knowledge so that the community can sustain the work that was done for prevention.
Liberal
Don Rusnak Liberal Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
One of the interesting things that I believe Mr. Lake had said is that you don't let the professionals in your firm get involved in third-party management unless they've put in 10 years. Is that correct?
Partner, Consulting, BDO Canada
Based on our hiring, and Jacques will be able to reinforce this, there are CPAs who typically end up being manager level or above after about 10 years of experience, and certainly from there they would have a two-year training program to get up to speed.
Liberal
Don Rusnak Liberal Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
Okay. Do you mean, in order to get into third-party management, because it's so complex?
Liberal
Don Rusnak Liberal Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
Okay.
That just struck me because we're asking people, such as the guy walking down the street in front of the band office, to do this work, and sometimes paying them very little. I guess the answer's obvious. It is not appropriate and not the way to do it.
Partner, Consulting, BDO Canada
It's not just at the band management level, but also at the leadership level.
You're freshly elected. These rules are complicated.
I tried to explain some aspects of the aboriginal ecosystem to my colleagues, and I decided to make a presentation deck. I stopped at 90 pages in trying to explain it.
Liberal
Don Rusnak Liberal Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
So the system needs to change.
They're nodding, for the record.
Liberal
Liberal
The Chair Liberal MaryAnn Mihychuk
Accountants don't say much, right?
We're moving to the final round of questions, and that's going to be by MP Viersen.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our guests for being here today. It's much appreciated.
One of the things we've heard repeatedly in this study, but also in studies going back, is the term “capacity-building”.
It's a great term. Everybody likes to use it, but I guess, perhaps, if we could just go through that a little bit from your perspective and explain it. Could you give me the top three things that you do to build capacity? I'm looking for nuts and bolts on this.
What is a capacity-building? It's a nice term, and we all mean it, but it's like trying to boil the ocean, in terms of what capacity-building actually means.
When you do third-party management, part of your job is to build capacity. What are the top three things you start to work on?
Vice-President, Aboriginal Services, MNP LLP
I think Rob and I will co-answer this question. From a nuts-and-bolts perspective, we have 60 training programs that we have designed and developed for delivery in communities for specific needs, such as accounts payable, budgeting, and process items.
We recognize that many of our clients come from remote areas. They're not going to be able to go into a centre to do a two-year business diploma or degree, so we've developed customized programs for that, up to a five-week, fully-certified bookkeeping training program. That's a nuts-and-bolts answer.
Robert.
Director, Aboriginal Services, MNP LLP
As well, of course, we assess the individuals who are working within the finance function inside the community, to determine their current level of awareness, understanding, interest, or even desire.
We find people who are in those roles because they were that person walking down the street. One lady the other day said, “I was hired to be the receptionist. Now I'm the head of finance.” She had no desire. She didn't even realize it, until one day she came to work, and they said, “You're the head of finance.”
Given that reality, we do one-on-one coaching. We do group coaching. We bring people into our offices. We go to the community, and we use external providers, aboriginal colleges like Yellowquill in Winnipeg, and others, to provide that.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
I get the impression, though, that the term “capacity-building” is like trying to boil the ocean.