Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you very much for the question. The majority of opportunities are held back by investment and access to financing. It's very difficult sometimes in first nations communities to be able to lever access to finance to do business expansion. For us in business development, all

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes. MP Vidal is correct. We do have a company called Polar Oils. Polar Oils is a fuel wholesaling company. Right in our traditional territory, we have Cold Lake air force base and also the Primrose Lake Air Weapons Range. We have been unable to get through the bureaucracy with

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Okay. With respect to federal procurement practices, we encourage you to simplify the access for indigenous business to procurement opportunities. It's very cumbersome as it currently exists. The last one is to firmly promote free trade for indigenous-owned businesses throughou

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to appear today on behalf of the nine nations of the Meadow Lake Tribal Council and our economic development corporation, MLTC Industrial Investments. As introduced, my name is Tina Rasmussen. I'm corporate development off

Natural Resources committee  Yes, we have. We are currently using the grant program to the tune of about $3.4 million. For NorSask Forest Products it has been very, very helpful. I think if you look at the program itself, you will see that a lot of the aboriginal communities or indigenous groups that have be

Natural Resources committee  That's a huge one for us: 31% of the people working in the forestry industry are either first nation or Métis. The number of people and families it is impacting is tremendous. That includes the people who are working in the harvesting companies and the trucking companies. The for

Natural Resources committee  Sorry.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, the bioenergy centre will be completed probably by December 2021. I invite you to check it out. You can watch it go up completely online at www.mltcbioenergy.ca. Yes, the government contributed $52.5 million. That equates to about 75% of the overall cost of construction of

Natural Resources committee  We would hold it up as an opportunity for all indigenous communities, but as I said earlier, the issue is how do you afford to do it? Selling the energy doesn't make it economically viable; it has to be supported by governments. This went through a grant process. We received $5

Natural Resources committee  In the same way as the tariff, it's going to have a direct impact on the communities. It's going to mean that much less money going directly back to our stakeholders, to our shareholders, to our member communities. We're making every effort we can to look at all potential new ide

Natural Resources committee  I'm probably not the best one to comment on that because I don't work directly with NorSask Forest Products, but just in general it makes it more difficult for us to ride the ebbs and flows of the market. If you're a multinational company with investments in the United States, yo

Natural Resources committee  MLTC has owned NorSask Forest Products for probably the longest of most of its companies, and it is the most developed in our organization, so of course it is the most organized and provides the best outputs for our communities in terms of employment development. As I was sayin

Natural Resources committee  No, it absolutely has not. We continue to suffer the impacts. Many larger corporations have diversified their portfolios by opening up plants in the U.S., thereby avoiding those tariffs, but with a small single corporation like NorSask Forest Products, we—MLTC—only have one plant

Natural Resources committee  Like any other first nation's economic development corporation, our goal is to provide revenue back to our home community. In our home communities, all of that revenue is used to support education, health care and economic development at a local level and for improvement to servi

Natural Resources committee  At NorSask we've been very tenacious and managed to stay afloat. It is our main focus and our largest employer in northern Saskatchewan. I don't know how many of you have visited northern Saskatchewan, but we're very remote and isolated and very sparsely populated. The forest ind