Thank you.
I think your story, MP McLeod, is so important, because you highlighted all of the challenges indigenous businesses have faced over a history of colonialism.
I do want to acknowledge your comment about the 5% target. That's the floor. We're hoping what we'll see is even more indigenous businesses being able to prosper not just from Canada as a customer, but also, hopefully, from other orders of government as well.
I will say that the numbers in my own remarks illustrate that this is not only good for indigenous communities and businesses, for opportunities for employment and for self-determination around all kinds of different things, but also really good for the economy of Canada. We are just shooting ourselves in the foot if we don't actually move more quickly to ensure that first nations, Inuit and Métis companies and people have opportunities to succeed.
You asked a really specific question about what the next steps are. I will say that we've been meeting with an advisory committee of a number of different procurement experts, business experts, from all of the distinctions bases over the last couple of years to try to get to that answer. What would an independent procurement list agency look like? Who should hold this responsibility? Quite frankly, we haven't really had a consensus across the different distinctions groups or organizations that we're working with.
I think the next step is to pull people together again to think about whether they would like to proceed as a collective to design something that more quickly removes this responsibility from the government's department and places it into an independent type of agency. It would be something that not only could be stood up quickly but that also could provide the space for indigenous people to do what, I think, will be their hard job of wrangling around how they will define identity.
Identity, as you know, as an indigenous person yourself, is not as cut and dried as some of the opponents would like to make it seem. There are different ways that people define indigeneity. Indigenous peoples themselves define indigeneity differently. The Government of Canada's colonial process of having a very heavy hand in whether someone is status or not—for example, with first nations—complicates this conversation tremendously.
I am looking forward to this work happening soon. I hope that we'll have something to say in the new year about it. We're moving very quickly with partners on the next steps.