Year in Review 2025: A Year of Action & Impact

Year in Review 2025: A Year of Action & Impact

A Few Highlights

  • We ended the year with over 2,600 members. Despite a tough economic climate, we did not see a decline in new Indigenous business memberships.
  • To support this growth, we welcomed 16 new colleagues this year. CCIB is now a truly national force of 57 employees working from across the country, from Halifax to Vancouver Island.
  • CCIB achieved a 25% Indigenous spend in its own operations in 2025.
  • The newest iteration of the Indigenous Procurement Marketplace, CCIB’s next-generation Supply Change Marketplace platform, launched at year’s end to provide more intuitive navigation, improved accessibility and interactive maps, making it easier for the 161 corporate buyers to connect and do business with the 1,722 Certified Indigenous Businesses in our system.
  • We launched the Buy Indigenous to Buy Canadian campaign. It’s a simple message with a big impact: Indigenous business is essential to the Canadian economy, and it became our single most successful campaign to date, with thousands liking, sharing and supporting the effort.
  • We implemented a Tariff Support page to help our members navigate the trade complexities that emerged last year and were committed to keeping it current and relevant to Indigenous business members, providing timely information when people needed it most.
  • Our research team published six major reports this year. The A Way Forward series with the Ontario Chamber of Commerce was and continues to be leveraged as a roadmap for equity in finance, procurement, and infrastructure.
  • Our messages to promote and equip Indigenous businesses are reaching further than ever. Our e-Newsletter now hits over 14,000 readers, and the Indigenous Business Report magazine saw over 30,000 views on LinkedIn.

CCIB team members participated in dozens of media interviews with key messages such as:

  • Encouraging consumers and procurement officers to Buy Indigenous to Buy Canadian
  • Highlighting how Indigenous businesses were being uniquely impacted by tariffs and advocating for them, and
  • Promoting early engagement and full participation of Indigenous communities in future development.

In-person Events

  • Between CCIB’s East Coast Business Forum & Awards in Halifax last spring, the Central Business Forum and Indigenous Women in Leadership Awards in Toronto and a sold-out West Coast Forum and Awards in the fall in Vancouver — in addition to the PAIR awards — CCIB connected almost 2,000 attendees across signature events in 2025.
  • At those events, CCIB honoured some incredible Indigenous business leaders last year, including Michael McDonald for Lifetime Achievement and Keenan Beavis as the Young Indigenous Entrepreneur of the Year, Ruby Littlechild for Indigenous Women in Leadership, and Art Cunningham with the Award for Excellence in Indigenous Relations. CCIB also presented its first Indigenous Business of the Year award to Bouchier.
  • At the Indigenous Relations Forum in Vancouver this past October, it was an honour to recognize CCIB’s newest PAIR recipients: 20 Bronze–, 10 Silver–, and 3 Gold-level companies. These organizations opened their books and their doors to independent PAIR Jury members and Verifiers, proving that reconciliation isn’t a marketing slogan. It’s a business priority.
  • CCIB’s Tools for Indigenous Business (TIB) team hit the road, connecting with hundreds of Indigenous businesses across the country, hosting networking events in Ottawa, Halifax, Edmonton, Montreal, Vancouver, and Winnipeg.
  • Indigenous Procurement Events and tradeshows were hosted in Toronto (233 attendees, 22 tradeshow booths) and Winnipeg (203 attendees, 19 tradeshow booths). Indigenous Procurement Roundtables were hosted in Grand Prairie, Alberta, Winnipeg, and

An event strategy was created, and from now on, CCIB will be hosting:

    • The Central Business Forum & Awards Dinner at the end of February in Toronto each year.
    • The West Business Forum & Awards Dinner, as well as the PAIR Awards, every fall in Vancouver.
    • The Indigenous Women in Leadership event will alternate between Calgary and Ottawa in June, with this year’s event being in Calgary and the 10th anniversary celebration of IWIL in Ottawa in June 2027.
    • A special East Coast Connect event in Atlantic Canada every other year, beginning in 2027.
    • Tools for Indigenous Business networking events and other round tables and procurement events will be presented across the country, including the next Indigenous procurement event and tradeshow in Vancouver this March.

Policy

In addition to events, CCIB’s policy work was a priority this past year and will continue to be a focus.

Last December, CCIB staff and guests were in Ottawa for the AFN Special Chiefs Assembly, and CCIB took the opportunity to host a reception and meet directly with Ministers and Deputy Ministers to ensure Indigenous business priorities stay at the top of the government’s agenda. The reception was very well attended at senior levels, including two Ministers and three Deputy Ministers. Meetings were organized and led by CCIB for outreach to various Ottawa-based organizations, including Finance Canada, DND, ISED, Defence Construction Canada and the Impact Assessment Agency. Senior CCIB team members also attended meetings with the Minister of Natural Resources and the office of MP Billy Morin (Edmonton). Whether it was discussing Indigenous Foreign Trade Zones or government procurement opportunities, CCIB is making sure Indigenous business interests are represented.

In 2025, CCIB’s Public Policy team focused on breaking down international borders and traditional retail barriers with five key policy briefs:

  • Retail Access (Think Growth): A strategic push to get more Indigenous-made products onto mainstream retail shelves across Canada.
  • Trade Sovereignty (Indigenous Foreign Trade Zones): A proposal for Indigenous-controlled trade zones that would allow for international trade free from standard Canadian tariffs and restrictions.
  • Defence Sector Integration: A roadmap of recommendations to help Indigenous firms, the government, and corporations collaborate effectively on national defence contracts.
  • U.S. Trade Navigation (FAQ for Exporters): Practical, real-time guidance for members to navigate sudden shifts in U.S. trade policies and cross-border regulations.
  • The Canada-U.S. Relationship: A document positioning Indigenous trade as a “cornerstone” of future diplomatic and economic negotiations between Canada and the United States.

Throughout the year, CCIB’s public policy team engaged in activities to support Indigenous trade, including an Indo-Pacific Round Table and ongoing work on trade to understand the impacts of changing U.S. rules related to tariffs and the impacts of this on Indigenous businesses. CCIB collected information from members on the impacts and provided input to the Prime Minister and the Canadian government on behalf of members. CCIB presented to the Senate Standing Committee on Transport and Communications to draw attention to the impacts of rail and port strikes on remote Indigenous businesses.

Research

The CCIB Research team published six new reports this year.

The A Way Forward series with the Ontario Chamber of Commerce was a four-part series to advance economic reconciliation:

  • Part I: Education & Employment – Businesses were challenged to move past diversity hiring and toward true equity for Indigenous inclusion.
  • Part II: Finance and Capital – The report explored how the $10 billion Robinson-Huron Treaty settlement represents a generational opportunity to invest in Indigenous trusts and governance.
  • Part III: Procurement – The report outlined how to break down the systemic walls that keep Indigenous SMEs out of massive supply chains.
  • Part IV: Lands and Infrastructure – It was emphasized that Indigenous Peoples must be equity partners in the infrastructure that crosses their territories.

CCIB also concluded its work with NRCan on the Forestry industry, looking at how to blend Traditional Knowledge with Western forestry to ensure community sustainability.

And finally, CCIB entered into year two of a five-year Indigenous Financial Well-being Initiative with the McConnell Foundation. A national survey with Environics is helping CCIB understand exactly what kind of financial tools Indigenous entrepreneurs need to scale from local to global.

PAIR

2026 marks the 25th anniversary of this program, so some special recognition and celebrations are planned to honour that milestone

By the end of last year, 300 PAIR companies were actively engaged in the program. This commitment to a rigorous, third-party audited framework that measures how a company actually performs in Leadership, Employment, Business Development, and Community Relations continues to gain momentum at an unprecedented pace.

Out of those 300, 208 companies were at the Committed level, which means those are the organizations that are doing the hard, internal work of setting their baselines. But the real celebration belongs to the 92 companies that achieved and/or maintained certification.

Congratulations to the 54 new companies that joined PAIR in 2025, and the 9 that have already committed for 2026.

TIB and Grants

  • A new tool CCIB launched last year was the Indigenous Business Spotlight on Elmnt FM, to provide CCIB members with hourly airtime to tell their stories to new audiences, and we continue to bring new tools into the program to assist with everything from legal and HR issues to AI. For example, we partnered with Google in AI Prompting Essentials, which provided 500 Scholarships available to CCIB members.
  • CCIB also put capital directly into the hands of members with 22 $2,500 Indigenous Women Entrepreneurship Fund (IWEF) grants for women and 18 $2,500 Young Indigenous Business Grants (YIBG) for Indigenous youth, along with free CCIB memberships for one year for all recipients.

CCIB is grateful for the continued support from its many patron members, partners and sponsors in 2025, which enabled CCIB to deliver these grants as well as outstanding events and initiatives that support our CCIB Members to connect, network, learn and build business relationships across Canada.

CCIB’s programs/services that received sponsorship funding support include:

  • CCIB’s Indigenous Mini-MBA Program with Schulich School of Business,
  • Young Indigenous Business Grant
  • Indigenous Women Entrepreneurship Fund
  • Pay-It-Forward Sponsors that enabled CCIB to provide complimentary tickets directly to Certified Indigenous Business (CIB) members to attend CCIB’s Business Forum Events.
  • CCIB event and award sponsors allow CCIB to continue to celebrate and bring Indigenous business leaders together across the country, whether it is in board rooms or a ball rooms.

Please stay connected with CCIB by subscribing to the e-Newsletter, following CCIB on social media, and, of course, attending CCIB events.