First Nations surging to $100B economic force in Canada, Indigenous leaders predict
CBC
Entrepreneur Rob Tebb can see his company becoming bigger — a lot bigger.
"The opportunity is there to just grow this business to four or five times the size that it is," he said.
Tebb, who is Métis, owns Regina-based Xtended Hydraulics & Machine with his wife, Katherine. More than half their staff of 26 is Indigenous.
The high-tech company makes specialized parts, mostly for mining companies, and has just broken into a new market: the defence industry. It's a moment Tebb has been working toward for years.
Like many Indigenous business leaders, Tebb said he feels a wave of economic development and business opportunity is rolling across the country.
This week, that wave officially surged into Toronto at a conference called Indigenomics on Bay Street, which brought together a mix of government, corporate and Indigenous leaders.
All were focused on growing the Indigenous economy in Canada to $100 billion a year and marking the paths to make the goal a reality.
Carol Anne Hilton, the event's organizer and founder of the Indigenomics Institute, said putting Bay Street into the conference name is an "invitation for corporate Canada to respond" and to learn "about the strategic advantage of working with Indigenous people."
"Indigenomics" is "economics from an Indigenous worldview," Hilton said, adding that she invented the word before writing a book on the subject.
It's about taking a "constructive, generative" approach to economic growth for Indigenous communities, she said, in order to establish "the systemic inclusion of Indigenous Peoples in today's modern economy."
Hilton, a member of Hesquiaht First Nation in British Columbia, said she believes it's an antidote to the historical injustice of their exclusion from the economy through discrimination, laws like the Indian Act and Canada's system of reserves.
Indigenomics on Bay Street is the ninth Indigenous business event she's organized since 2019, but it's her first in the country's financial capital.
The Indigenous contribution to Canada's economy is on an upward trend, with the latest data putting the value at almost $50 billion in 2020.
So where does the $100 billion goal come from?
