Excellent.
Thank you for having me, and condolences on the loss of a parliamentarian.
I will cut right to it. I represent the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business. We have a membership of more than 500 companies. Of those, 70% are aboriginal firms. We are the largest such business organization in Canada. We have been doing public policy research as well as corporate social responsibility in events and networking for aboriginal companies. The mission is to effectively connect corporate Canada with aboriginal firms. The 30% of our members who aren't aboriginal are some of the largest corporate players in Canada, including Suncor, Syncrude, IBM, Tim Hortons, etc. We bridge the gap between indigenous business and the indigenous economy and mainstream corporate Canada.
As I said, we do quite a bit of public policy research. Our findings, in partnership with Environics Research Group as well as TD Economics, have demonstrated that the aboriginal economy in Canada is booming. It is growing at a remarkable pace. There are roughly 43,000 aboriginal companies in Canada. Those companies have increased in the last five years. The profitability of those companies has increased by 15%. The number of profitable companies as well as the profitability has increased markedly.
The research we did with TD Economics demonstrates that aboriginal companies do more business abroad than the Canadian average and they introduce more new services, processes, or products to their firms than the Canadian average. Based on that, we would say that they innovate more than the Canadian average.
This significant growth is something that I think is overlooked in most of the Canadian discourse. I would say it's a significant bright spot in the relationship between indigenous Canadians and the broader society. We have been working for the last 30 years at CCAB to support and facilitate that growth.
What I would like to put forward to the committee is the importance of a number of very key things in the NAFTA renegotiations and as well in the broader policy context. We are quite concerned, obviously, because of the dependence and predominance of aboriginal companies that do business abroad and in the United States in particular, about anything to restrict that flow of trade across the border, as well as anything that would restrict the freedom of movement for indigenous peoples in businesses—in particular currently, set-asides for NAFTA.
That's the defensive position. The more offensive position that we see is that the current reservations in NAFTA allow for set-asides from the Canadian government to support aboriginal businesses. We would like to see that language expanded somewhat to be more reflective of what is in CETA. This would give the federal government a broader scope of action to support aboriginal businesses. What you see in Canada right now is firms such as Suncor or Bruce Power doing considerable work to support aboriginal businesses through procurement processes, companies such as TransAlta doing really innovative work to help with financing, and the Government of Canada federally being somewhat tied by trade policy. We would like to see that changed with the updated NAFTA.
We would also really like to put forward, as I'm sure some of my colleagues will as well, the point that there is a concern around intellectual property. We would be quite concerned about anything that negotiates away parts of indigenous intellectual property, which may not be on the top of the agenda or the first thing that comes to mind for the government when discussing this issue with the United States.
How am I doing for time? I usually don't do this in five minutes.