Wonderful.
Thank you for having me, honourable members of the committee.
My name is Mr. JP Gladu. I'm calling in from Sand Point First Nation, which is actually just northeast of Thunder Bay.
I want to give you a little bit more of what I'm doing so you'll understand more where my comments are coming from.
I'm also on the board of Suncor and a couple of mining companies; chair of Boreal Leadership Champions, an environmental group; and chair of the Energy Futures Lab around the future transition of energies, as well as Canada's Forest Trust, an organization to meet the two-billion-trees commitment. The reason I tell you this is that I'm around a lot of our indigenous issues.
I'm incredibly grateful to the government. I'm going to go back to the time when I was the CEO of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business and Mark Little from Suncor and I came to the Hill to express the success that Suncor was having in our procurement work with indigenous communities.
Today we're encroaching on a billion-dollar spend with local indigenous businesses. It was great to see the government commit to a 5% target, and I encourage the government to keep on this track. When talking to my colleagues, I know there are plenty of challenges ahead. We have to drive that down the supply chain. As communities get access to business activity, you build the experience, and experience is a great teacher. That's how we actually build our economies. Without access to those business opportunities, it's very difficult to be on economic par with the rest of the country; it's incredibly important.
It's also incredibly important that Canadians understand that the success of our country is closely tied to the relationship with indigenous communities. When we start to comprehend this more, we'll see there's a big education piece. There is ignorance that still exists in Canada, and we have to get over the ignorance that still exists. In my last point, when I come back to this, you'll understand why.
Capital pools have been spoken about a number of times, I'm sure. The fact that the Canada Infrastructure Bank has the billion-dollar fund is amazing. Don't stop there. There is a $35-billion deficit in our communities alone, never mind this net-zero energy transition that our country is talking about. If we're going to get there in a successful way, we need to deepen and widen the capital pools so that our communities can be equitable members in any activity in our traditional territories.
With UNDRIP unpacking, if we don't get the relationships right.... As I mentioned, Canada's success is closely tied to our indigenous communities. I can point to countless numbers where, due to the poor relationships, we've lost opportunities because we're such a naturally richly endowed country.
I want to see more backstops or loans for communities to access to be able to participate. It was brought up in the previous panel, so I won't go too deep there. I'd love to see stronger relationships with provincial governments, with availability payments to support infrastructure projects so communities can rely on cash flow as they develop their relationships and partnerships in all sorts of infrastructure projects that are going to continue to go on in our country.
The last thing I want to address is that we need an overall strategy on the indigenous economy. There are lots of great ideas and there are incredible indigenous leaders at the table giving you ideas, but until you have a strategy that you can rely on, you're going to be all over the map. Work with organizations like the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business or the National Aboriginal Capital Corporations Association to help develop those strategies and [Technical difficulty—Editor] nations to do it alongside you.
I'm a big fan of Minister Ng, Minister of International Trade, Export Promotion, Small Business and Economic Development—I have to find shorter organizations; it's going to take me half my time to get through it—and it was great to see the economic development support for the BlackNorth Initiative. That's fantastic. There's north of $20 million being committed to a number of Black organizations. That is not happening in our indigenous community. We need to care, we need to believe, and we need to do.
I think the government cares. As an example—and I'm going to leave it here—when I was at the helm of CCAB, the government cared enough to ask us to submit a proposal for the budget to support indigenous entrepreneurs. We submitted it. The budget came out in 2019 and not only did we not get it in the budget, and that happens, but the government committed $3 million to Futurpreneur Canada to actually support indigenous entrepreneurs. That's not the belief that I expect from our country to believe in indigenous people. That is not the way we're going to build relationships. You need to empower indigenous organizations that have proven track records to support our own people. Why do we have to go back to the non-indigenous organizations to beg for resources to support our own people, when we have that capacity?
You have to care, you have to believe, and you have to do it by supporting our indigenous organizations, or we're going to be backspinning our wheels.
Thank you for your time, honourable committee.