Canada has its productivity gap; the nation’s aboriginal communities have their business management deficit.
Which is the more serious concern for the country’s economic future is open to debate.
The productivity and innovation gap is chronic for this resource-dependent land. Corporate courage and realigned priorities would go a long way to rectifying that: invest more resources in technology and research and development; quit being satisfied with second rate.
Filling the native business management and entrepreneurial expertise vacuum, however, will take more than money and good intentions. Native business culture has to be retooled from the ground up.
The good news is that the country’s aboriginal population has some insightful leaders in the business self-reliance arena.
Clint Davis is one of them.
The president and CEO of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business (CCBA) has three university degrees, including a master’s of public administration from Harvard University.
Davis is a 40-year-old Inuk from Labrador. He’s married to a Métis. Has a five-month-old daughter.
He also has the bright light of entrepreneurial possibility in his eyes. In an animated discussion at the Sheraton Wall Centre prior to the September 16 CCBA gala awards dinner, Davis talked about the challenges facing aboriginal business development. Among them: education and, more specifically, education in business management.
Without it, bands won’t have control over their destiny, and they won’t be able to take advantage of the huge resource development opportunities surrounding them (see “Development deluge” – issue 1088; August 31-September 6).
But cultivating that expertise, especially on remote reserves, is easier said than done. As Davis points out, once band members have been sent to university, luring them back to a reserve in the hinterland to put their knowledge to work for the band is difficult. Bright lights, big cities, big paycheques, diverse urban lifestyles.
Not much of that in the bush.
Also, band power cliques don’t always welcome the newly educated with open arms. Among other things, their new knowledge is power – power that could destabilize ruling elites.
What to do? Davis suggests incentives and tribal obligations: university degrees, for example, could include a requirement to serve at least two years with the band administration on the reserve. But in addition to management training, native bands have to learn how to sell themselves and their assets. Become salespeople.
They also need a business plan, starting with an inventory of what they have to offer investors. In most cases that includes human and natural resources and a wide range of band-land incentives. Their plan needs to include a road map of where they want to go, when they want to get there and what kind of investment they want to attract.
Not enough of that is taking place on native reserves, Davis says.
In human resources alone, aboriginal bands have a huge advantage over other segments of the population, which is aging fast.
As “Building band business capacity” (issue 1091; September 21-27) points out, StatsCan numbers show that between 1996 and 2006 Canada’s aboriginal population grew 45% compared with a non-aboriginal population that grew only 8%.
First steps, however, include rejecting band cultures that look first to Ottawa for solutions.
Recycling taxpayer dollars doesn’t generate wealth. The sooner native bands embrace that reality, the brighter the future will be for them and the rest of the country.