It’s hard enough to start a business, but young Indigenous entrepreneurs face an even more uphill battle because of a systemic digital gap that’s holding them back — along with Canada’s entire economy.
That’s the main takeaway from a new report by RBC, after spending the last 18 months analyzing economic data and talking with Indigenous stakeholders about how to unlock and maximize their economic potential.
The report includes findings from online surveys of 2,000 Indigenous youth who agreed to participate in the bank’s Future Launch initiative, a 10-year, $500-million bank-funded initiative to help prepare young people for the jobs of tomorrow.
The Indigenous youth population in Canada is growing at a pace four times faster than the rest of the country’s youth, the report says, and Indigenous people create new businesses at nine times the Canadian average.
And while Indigenous entrepreneurs are a vast and growing cohort, a big reason they remain a largely untapped resource is a yawning digital divide.
Missed opportunity
It’s something that Edmonton-based business owner Mallory Yawnghwe knows firsthand. Growing up in Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta, she never saw the online world as a career opportunity because digital infrastructure in her community was so poor.
Last year, the federal government promised to make sure 98 per cent of the country has access to high-speed internet within five years. Despite that commitment, the report says more than three-quarters of households in First Nations communities don’t have it.
In a global economy that’s moving more and more online, that’s holding them back.
“I come from a reserve where we have very poor internet access,” Yawnghwe said in an interview. “To this day … literally you can’t get internet out there unless you have a connection to a Wi-Fi source, which a lot of people don’t have.”
It wasn’t until she got a business degree from MacEwan University in Edmonton that she saw the economic potential of being digitally connected.
Fast forward to 2020, the pandemic gave her an unexpected chance to fulfil her passion to elevate her community.
Using her digital skills, she reached out to other Indigenous business owners about selling their products packaged together with other Indigenous-made items, from beauty products, to food, to housewares.
Indigenous Box was born — and it’s growing quickly. Launched in the spring of 2021 with a plan to ship four seasonal boxes a year, Yawnghwe says her customer base has already quadrupled and is now in the thousands.
“I see it as an opportunity to really shine some light on just what amazing things Indigenous entrepreneurs are doing,” she said.
Keith Matthew, director of the Tulo Centre for Indigenous Economics at Thompson Rivers University in B.C., says he sees those impacts himself all the time.
A former councillor and chief of the Simpcw First Nation, about an hour north of Kamloops, B.C., Matthew says that less than 20 years ago, the community was relying on dozens of unreliable and expensive dial-up internet connections.
In 2007, the local council decided to spend $175,000 to set up a fibre-optic connection, and Matthew says it was the best investment they ever made.
WATCH | How high speed Internet has been a life saver during COVID-19:
Keith Matthew of the Simpcw First Nation near Kamloops says high speed internet has been a life saver for his community, especially during the pandemic. 0:38
“If we didn’t have that connection, a lot of young people would not have [what] they need to advance their careers,” he said in an interview.
Two-thirds of jobs currently held by Indigenous workers in Canada are in danger of either being eliminated or drastically changed by technology, according to the RBC report.
Remote and rural communities are especially in danger because of the infrastructure gap, Matthew said. “Young people get left further and further behind [and] it exacerbates the issue of young people leaving.”
Julie Nagam says that when you give people access to digital tools they didn’t have before, there’s no telling what they will come up with — and the rewards are often great. (Lenard Monkman/CBC)
The advantages of being digitally connected are vast — and they often pay off in ways you don’t expect, says Julie Nagam, director of the Winnipeg-based Aabijijiwan New Media Lab. The recently opened lab provides access to basic web tools, such as computers for sound and video editing work, all the way up to complex tasks, like 3D printing and computer animation.
When you give someone access to creative digital tools they didn’t have before, “the sky’s the limit,” said Nagam. “That provides people the opportunity to dream, to think about what’s the potential, the future and where they can push it.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen until people actually have access to that,” she said. “It provides people with new opportunities and new potential training and job opportunities.”
But it’s not just skills and infrastructure that can pose a problem. The report found there’s a systemic bias at play that robs Indigenous entrepreneurs of one of their secret weapons: Confidence.
While the young people surveyed were very confident on the whole in their problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration and creative skills, they were 13 per cent less likely to describe themselves as having enough digital skills to thrive.
That makes sense to Yawnghwe. “Throughout my life I felt I tried to not feel discouraged by racism, by discrimination, by people thinking that I wasn’t smart enough to be in these spaces,” she said.
Those biased assumptions play out in unequal access to funding from banks. As the RBC report acknowledges, Indigenous people “face structural and systemic barriers to financial security, from restrictions under the Indian Act on asset ownership, to racial bias of lenders.”
RBC tabulates that the Indigenous economy in Canada is currently worth about $33 billion, but growing it to a level proportionate to its population would triple that amount.
That’s almost $70 billion worth of new money for local communities — and Canada’s economy as a whole.
For Yawnghwe, it’d be an especially welcome sight to see.
“We’re natural entrepreneurs,” she said. “We are the original supply chain of this entire continent, with a trade network that spanned the entire continent prior to colonization. We are just stepping back into these spaces.”
OTTAWA – The federal government is expected to boost the minimum hourly wage that must be paid to temporary foreign workers in the high-wage stream as a way to encourage employers to hire more Canadian staff.
Under the current program’s high-wage labour market impact assessment (LMIA) stream, an employer must pay at least the median income in their province to qualify for a permit. A government official, who The Canadian Press is not naming because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the change, said Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault will announce Tuesday that the threshold will increase to 20 per cent above the provincial median hourly wage.
The change is scheduled to come into force on Nov. 8.
As with previous changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker program, the government’s goal is to encourage employers to hire more Canadian workers. The Liberal government has faced criticism for increasing the number of temporary residents allowed into Canada, which many have linked to housing shortages and a higher cost of living.
The program has also come under fire for allegations of mistreatment of workers.
A LMIA is required for an employer to hire a temporary foreign worker, and is used to demonstrate there aren’t enough Canadian workers to fill the positions they are filling.
In Ontario, the median hourly wage is $28.39 for the high-wage bracket, so once the change takes effect an employer will need to pay at least $34.07 per hour.
The government official estimates this change will affect up to 34,000 workers under the LMIA high-wage stream. Existing work permits will not be affected, but the official said the planned change will affect their renewals.
According to public data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, 183,820 temporary foreign worker permits became effective in 2023. That was up from 98,025 in 2019 — an 88 per cent increase.
The upcoming change is the latest in a series of moves to tighten eligibility rules in order to limit temporary residents, including international students and foreign workers. Those changes include imposing caps on the percentage of low-wage foreign workers in some sectors and ending permits in metropolitan areas with high unemployment rates.
Temporary foreign workers in the agriculture sector are not affected by past rule changes.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2024.
OTTAWA – The parliamentary budget officer says the federal government likely failed to keep its deficit below its promised $40 billion cap in the last fiscal year.
However the PBO also projects in its latest economic and fiscal outlook today that weak economic growth this year will begin to rebound in 2025.
The budget watchdog estimates in its report that the federal government posted a $46.8 billion deficit for the 2023-24 fiscal year.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland pledged a year ago to keep the deficit capped at $40 billion and in her spring budget said the deficit for 2023-24 stayed in line with that promise.
The final tally of the last year’s deficit will be confirmed when the government publishes its annual public accounts report this fall.
The PBO says economic growth will remain tepid this year but will rebound in 2025 as the Bank of Canada’s interest rate cuts stimulate spending and business investment.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
OTTAWA – Statistics Canada says the level of food insecurity increased in 2022 as inflation hit peak levels.
In a report using data from the Canadian community health survey, the agency says 15.6 per cent of households experienced some level of food insecurity in 2022 after being relatively stable from 2017 to 2021.
The reading was up from 9.6 per cent in 2017 and 11.6 per cent in 2018.
Statistics Canada says the prevalence of household food insecurity was slightly lower and stable during the pandemic years as it fell to 8.5 per cent in the fall of 2020 and 9.1 per cent in 2021.
In addition to an increase in the prevalence of food insecurity in 2022, the agency says there was an increase in the severity as more households reported moderate or severe food insecurity.
It also noted an increase in the number of Canadians living in moderately or severely food insecure households was also seen in the Canadian income survey data collected in the first half of 2023.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct 16, 2024.
