At this year’s AFN Annual General Assembly, I had the opportunity to sit down with the National Aboriginal Capital Corporations Association — NACCA — to talk about something I believe in deeply: the future of Indigenous business in Canada.

The numbers are remarkable. Indigenous entrepreneurs are starting businesses at the fastest rate in the country. Indigenous-owned companies are already hiring locally, investing in their communities, and driving economic growth across the North, the Arctic, and right across Canada.

And yet the federal procurement system — the billions of dollars the Government of Canada spends every year on goods and services — has historically not reflected that reality. Indigenous businesses have been underrepresented in federal contracting for decades, despite the quality, the capacity, and the growing scale of the Indigenous business sector.

That is changing. And NACCA is at the centre of that change — providing the capital, the technical support, and the advocacy that Indigenous entrepreneurs need to compete for federal contracts and grow their enterprises.

My conversation with NACCA at the AGA reinforced for me that economic reconciliation is not just a values statement. It is a procurement policy. It is a contracting decision. It is a choice that governments make every single day about who builds our infrastructure, who delivers our services, and who benefits from the economic activity that federal spending generates.

For communities in Churchill–Keewatinook Aski — where Indigenous entrepreneurship is growing and where the economic potential of the North is extraordinary — this conversation is directly relevant. I am committed to advocating for expanded Indigenous business access to federal procurement, and to ensuring that the economic growth happening in and around this riding stays in this riding.