QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Public Services and Procurement
Awarding of Contracts
October 18, 2023
Hello, minister. Earlier, you answered Senator Gerba’s question about the content of your mandate letter, which talks about 5% of the total value of federal contracts being held by Indigenous businesses.
I did not quite understand whether you set any targets for Black communities, but you will need to have targets in order to measure these communities’ progress and determine whether the objectives have been met.
I am not sure whether you mentioned targets for these communities.
Thank you for that excellent question. Let me be a bit more clear. There is a clear target of 5% for Indigenous-owned or -operated businesses. We look forward to sharing the initial results of those measures in early 2024.
Similarly, in 2021, we also implemented a plan to diversify the procurement process to increase competition in the awarding of such contracts. Since 2021, there has been a pilot project that has made it possible to help Black-owned or -operated businesses enter into 12 procurement contracts with the Canadian government. The purpose of the pilot project is to determine whether the process is working well, so that we can assess the results it achieves in terms of job creation and identify the challenges that these businesses have perhaps had to face since the pilot project began. We will then see how we can move forward. We could set specific targets for certain groups, including Black-owned or -operated businesses.
Thank you very much.
