Meegwetch. Thank you.
First, on procurement, we have been working quite closely with the government, as I said, on pushing for the 5%, and for every ministry and organization to meet the 5%. Within CCAB we have a program called “supply change”, which has a procurement marketplace and close to [Technical difficulty—Editor] with corporate Canada. That's enabling them to be able to get the expertise to respond to bids and to build their capacity, but definitely we need to ensure that we're building capacity within indigenous businesses to be able to work with the federal government. That's one key area.
We also need policy changes within the government in order for us to ensure that indigenous businesses have access. Within our procurement marketplace, we do share [Technical difficulty—Editor] government [Technical difficulty—Editor], but we've been working with other national indigenous organizations to understand how best we can bring together all of the indigenous businesses that we support and ensure that they have connections to the federal government as well.
From a program development perspective, we continue to push for every ministry and organization within the federal government to look at their programming and ensure that there aren't barriers for indigenous businesses to respond; ensure that they're communicating specifically to indigenous businesses, which of course we're here to help with; and have set-asides within those programming dollars—for ISED to have set-asides within their programming dollars, for the Minister of Agriculture to have set-asides—to ensure that indigenous businesses have a niche within those programming dollars to be able to apply.
When we look at infrastructure, as we've seen before in other provinces and other governments, when infrastructure is being built in communities, we need to ensure that there's a community business that's part of that project, or a community as an equity project. I think there's [Technical difficulty—Editor] incent corporates and to incent equity partnerships in ensuring that any procurement response or RFP specifically with infrastructure has an indigenous community or an indigenous business as part of that project.