Miles Morrisseau
ICT
Hit hard by the ongoing tariffs and trade war with the Trump administration, Indigenous businesses across Canada are working to navigate the rough trade waters in this new economic reality.
The turmoil has brought renewed effort from the Canadian Council for Indigenous Business through its “Buy Indigenous” campaign to work with businesses and lobby the Canadian government for support.
About 90 percent of Indigenous businesses are small micro-enterprises, Tabatha Bull, the council’s president and chief executive officer, told ICT.
“Anytime there’s uncertainty in the economy, that hurts small businesses a lot more than it does large businesses,” Bull said. “They don’t have in-house legal teams or teams that are working specifically with brokers and customs brokers. So just navigating the various changes in tariffs and what will be tariffed and what won’t be tariffed has caused an additional uncertainty for many of our members.”
Scrambling for new markets
The CCIB was established in 1984 with the goal of supporting Indigenous business and growing the Indigenous economy in Canada. The nonprofit is a membership-based organization with approximately 2,700 members from every province and territory in the country.
“About 65 to 70 percent of our businesses are Indigenous business, and the rest are organizations across Canada who are looking to how they can work better with Indigenous businesses and communities and employ more Indigenous people,” said Bull, of the Nipissing First Nation in Ontario. “A lot of our work also is advocacy and lobbying at various levels of government to support Indigenous entrepreneurs.”
The council has been helping Indigenous entrepreneurs deal with tariffs ever since the Trump administration began targeting Canadian imports.
“From the initial onset of the tariffs, we have set up a tariff support page on our website just to help businesses navigate where there are potential supports available and the constant stream and change of news that we’re seeing,” she said.
Bull sits on Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada/US Economic Relations Council and works to get programs of support accessible to Indigenous businesses.
“There were some requirements with respect to having a minimum of five employees, a minimum of $1 million revenue and a minimum of three years of profitable organization,” Bull said.
“We know that many Indigenous businesses don’t have $1 million in revenue, nor do they have five employees. So we’ve been really pushing for some of those barriers to be removed,” she said, noting that recently, “some updates to the programs were announced and they did remove the employee minimum, but we’re still pushing on the $1 million revenue piece because we know more than 50 percent of Indigenous businesses here in Canada aren’t meeting that $1 million revenue target.”
Indigenous businesses like other Canadian businesses have been scrambling to find other markets as the profitability of the U.S. market has been reduced.
“Many businesses already started to look at how they could find other customers,” Bull said. “If we look first just at consumer product businesses, some of them have stopped shipping to the U.S., unfortunately, just because of the high shipping costs and some of the tariff programs as well.”
Looking ahead
Trade within Canada is the immediate opportunity but barriers still exist, she said.
“We’ve seen with some of the removal of the provincial trade barriers here in Canada, that’s opened up new economies for Indigenous business to be able to find new customers within Canada,” Bull said. “One of the issues that is still a bit of a concern is the shipping. If you’re a business in Vancouver, it’s a lot easier to ship to Seattle than it is to Ontario or Toronto.”
She added, “We’ve had a lot of conversation on First-Nation-to-First-Nation trade. That was something that we were really hoping we’d be able to advance more … We’re still having good conversations with some of our friends in the U.S.”
The Carney administration has pivoted away from the U.S. with its “Build Canada Strong” policy, which promotes big projects such as mining and pipelines through a newly established Major Projects Office. Bull is working with the federal government to ensure that Indigenous businesses have a share in those developments.
“We are really pushing to ensure that at least 5 percent of the spend within Build Canada projects and the major projects that the prime minister is putting forward also have an opportunity and are required to have Indigenous businesses supporting them,” Bull said.
“The prime minister has established this major projects office in Canada and they have an Indigenous advisory board that’s really working at looking at many of these major projects and how to ensure Indigenous businesses and communities are able to benefit from them,” she said.
The “Buy Canada” approach is endorsed by the government and embraced by many Canadians. Within that strategy the council has championed its “Buy Indigenous” campaign, which was launched in January of 2025..
“Part of Build Canada is Buy Indigenous,” Bull said. “You can’t buy more Canadian than buying Indigenous and we have relaunched that campaign. We saw a lot of people use that logo and continue to push that logo.”
