Government Operations committee  Thanks for the question, Mr. Chair. On this one, I would say it has been moving with the input of the indigenous reference group and indigenous business communities.

Government Operations committee  Yes. The context of the change is that there was a concern that there may be individuals who would own a business—that would be 51%—but have nothing to do with it. The leadership—owned and led—is to make sure of those values and that over time and across the population of businesses, there is a stronger likelihood that a greater level of secondary and tertiary benefits will accrue to those communities as—

Government Operations committee  Ownership is a requirement for us.

Government Operations committee  It may be an oversight in terms of the language, but in terms of the policy, it's 51% owned and led.

Government Operations committee  Yes, we'll follow up on that, and Mr. Chair, I would like to respond quickly to the point of the earlier question. Particularly for the LGBTQ+ community, there are serious concerns about revealing their identity, who would have access—

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, again, those are a part of the groups covered by our policy. As we're doing the overall policy, we're not segregating group by group.

Government Operations committee  We'll be providing it.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, with respect to indigenous businesses, the inability to pledge on-reserve assets to secure bonds is a unique problem that exists in the Indian Act,. That's the issue that we're looking to address.

Government Operations committee  Certainly we are looking at having the ability to make sure that we're capturing subcontracts. That's so that when we do large contracts that will necessarily involve subcontracting, we are creating positive incentives for them to follow some of our actions to make more opportunities available for diverse businesses and to make sure that they're not reimposing barriers that we've tried to remove through our normal contracting process.

Government Operations committee  As my colleague indicated, we're rolling out the new initiatives to meet the 5% target. We're looking to meet a three-year timeframe overall for the government to meet that target. Some of the barriers to meeting that target would be around the nature and location of commodities and services.

Government Operations committee  We are working on the north to figure out how we ensure that we are, first and foremost, respecting our comprehensive claims and land claim agreements. In the case of Nunavut, the Nunavut agreement would have much higher requirements for procurement with Nunavut beneficiaries than the 5%.

Government Operations committee  We have Clinton Lawrence-Whyte with us from Procurement Assistance Canada. One of the things that we really do focus on is making that agency a vehicle for businesses to understand why they may not have been successful. We have coaching pilots and other mechanisms to address the specific issue that prevented them from being qualified or winning.

Government Operations committee  As we mentioned, through the development of our socio-economic policy and continued work on the program, we have been engaging indigenous businesses. Procurement Assistance Canada does have a lot of outreach and engagement with business. We also work with Treasury Board and Indigenous Services Canada, which has an indigenous reference group of representative organizations, such as the Council for the Advancement of Native Development Officers and the National Aboriginal Capital Corporations Association, to understand their needs and get their feedback.

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the question. With respect to ArriveCAN, I want to make a distinction between subcontracting to companies and subcontracting to employees. In this case, my understanding is that the firm in question was subcontracting employees to do the work. In terms of that piece, from a contracting perspective, we do look and we are working on systems to capture the value of subcontracts to companies, but not necessarily subcontracted resources that are, for purposes of a contract, treated as employees.

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I might ask Levent to answer this one in terms of the policy responsibility. He can talk a bit about the policy context and where we've been over the last three years.