Do this first · before the first bid
Get the cap table right before the first bid, not after.
The threshold as stated in the meeting
51/49 so it’s Canadian-owned
This threshold unlocks nothing. It is also the exact shape of the arrangements Ottawa is currently unwinding.
The threshold that actually matters
51%+ Indigenous-owned and controlled, IBD-registered, with the Canadian entity owning or perpetually licensing the delivery IP
Same afternoon of legal work. Entirely different company.
It is the gate to a $1.24B annual pool.
Canadian ownership alone unlocks nothing. Indigenous ownership plus directory registration unlocks the federal set-aside.
The wrong structure is the pattern Ottawa is currently prosecuting.
Coradix and Dalian took more than $914M in federal contracts before Indigenous Services found they failed PSIB qualification and both were suspended. Dalian was dissolved. Coradix sued for $64M. The Assembly of First Nations told MPs that contracts meant for Indigenous businesses are going to shell companies.
The Globe and Mail; Public Services and Procurement Canada, March 2024
The auditors are now looking, on a six-month clock.
The Procurement Ombud’s March 2026 review found evidence of directory verification absent in 20 of 27 files, and no evidence any department verified the 33% Indigenous content rule on a single active contract. It will report publicly on progress every six months. What nobody checked in 2024 becomes a bid-killer in 2027.
Office of the Procurement Ombud, March 2026
The visible benchmark is already higher than 51%.
R8dius — Deloitte’s joint venture with Kitsaki Management, the economic arm of Lac La Ronge Indian Band — launched October 2024 as Indigenous majority-owned with 80% Indigenous staff. That is the number this entity will be measured against, not 51% ownership on paper.
The action
Dana holds majority. The Canadian entity owns the delivery IP. This costs a lawyer an afternoon and it is the single highest-return action available before Tuesday.
The denominator · and why it changes the company
The addressable market is not 619 nations. It is 27 treaties.
The Indian Act funds year to year. A nation that does not know whether a department exists next April cannot lawfully sign a multi-year managed service agreement — which means the recurring-revenue thesis can only be built on governments that control their own fiscal horizon. That is the modern-treaty group. Everything else is project work, priced and sold differently.
Not 634 — that figure is stale and still circulating.
Indigenous Services Canada, First Nation Profiles, modified 14 Jan 2026
Covering roughly 97 communities. "27 First Nations" is a misstatement — the count is of treaties, not nations.
CIRNAC, 17 Feb 2026
The New Fiscal Relationship grant escapes year-to-year funding — but is gated behind a financial administration law and five performance ratios. 191 of 619 have cleared it.
Indigenous Services Canada, 9 Jan 2026
1,807,250 people. Growing 9.4% vs 5.3% — the fastest-growing demographic in the country. Average age 33.6 vs 41.8.
Statistics Canada, 2021 Census
The pool nobody in this meeting mentioned
Flowed to Indigenous businesses under Canada’s mandatory 5% federal procurement target in FY2023-24 — 6.11% of eligible contract value, against a directory of roughly 3,000 registered businesses.
Indigenous Services Canada, published March 2025
The gate is 51% Indigenous-owned and controlled, listed in the Indigenous Business Directory, with 33% of contract value performed by Indigenous labour or business.
Two people, one hour, the same conclusion
Sell the outcome. Never the tooling.
These two metaphors were offered in the same conversation, by two people approaching the problem from opposite ends — one from delivery, one from the room where the decision gets made. Neither was building on the other. They landed on the same instruction anyway.
“If someone hires somebody to remodel their kitchen, the guy doesn’t show up and show them the skill saw. Let me show you the table saw, I bought it because of the RPMs, here are the chisels I like. They don’t do that. But technical people show up and show everyone the tools, and they lose the fact that they’re there to remodel the kitchen.”
Jeramey James, 6 August 2026
“By being able to show how you don’t have to walk there anymore — there’s a sports car that can get you there in days — this is how we get them to see the value.”
Dana Tizya-Tramm, 6 August 2026
The incumbent
The deliverable is a report.
This firm
The deliverable is a running system you can log into.
Three months to scope. Twelve to twenty-four months to deliver. Two million dollars.
Scoped in days. Delivered in weeks. Priced under signature authority.
Subcontracts the technical work to somebody you never meet.
Our own people. Named, on the contract, and measured as Indigenous labour content.
Leaves. The system nobody was trained on decays.
Stays. The leave-behind is the recurring revenue, because nobody else can operate it.
Who is on the contract
Named people, measured as Indigenous labour content.
Dana Tizya-Tramm
Policy, standing, and the room
Vuntut Gwitchin leader, strategist, father, and Chief of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation from 2019 to 2023 — elected at 31, believed the youngest in the Nation’s history. Acting Director of Nadlii, which works to help Indigenous Nations own, govern and benefit from their data, AI systems and digital infrastructure.
- TIME100 Next, 2022
- Clean50 2022, Emerging Leaders
- Testified before the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee on protecting the ANWR coastal plain, 26 March 2019
- Declared a climate state of emergency in Old Crow, 19 May 2019 — among the earliest by an Indigenous government in Canada
- Elected to the inaugural Yukon First Nations School Board, 2022
- Speaking at TEDxVictoria, 7 October 2026
Vuntut Gwitchin settled its Final Agreement 29 May 1993, effective 14 February 1995 — among the first four Yukon First Nations to sign. Old Crow is the only Yukon community with no road access.
Jeramey James
Delivery, architecture, and the build
Founder of Tolowa Studio. Former CIO for his own tribe. Former Gartner analyst covering tribal enterprise IT strategy. Twenty-five years across managed services, cloud and the Microsoft partner ecosystem, most of the last decade spent helping partners build Microsoft businesses.
- Seventeen live production web properties
- A 41-million-character retrieval corpus in production on Cloudflare Workers AI
- A Kubernetes platform ingesting twenty-five public data feeds continuously
Luke
Channel, infrastructure, and the northern compute leg
Convened this group. Carries the Microsoft and Arrow relationships, and the sovereign northern compute thread — Northwestel, the northern operators, and the satellite sites.
Megan
Operations and the policy analyzer
Runs operations and event coordination, and has been building the policy analyzer alongside Dana for over a year.
The structure is settled on paper.
Then the money conversation.