18 A CCIB PUBLICATION  Fall 2026
THE PEOPLE 
BEHIND PAIR
PAIR 25TH ANNIVERSARY
A
n employee tells a verifier 
in Canadian Council for 
Indigenous Business' (CCIB's) 
Partnership Accreditation in 
Indigenous Relations (PAIR) 
program about his impending fall 
hunting trip. On paper, it looks like a 
scheduling conflict, a request for time off 
that doesn’t map cleanly onto a company’s 
calendar. In reality, it is something very 
different, and Tom Browne, a semi-retired 
engineer who has spent the last several 
years verifying companies for PAIR 
certification, has heard versions of this 
story more than once. 
“It’s not just how us non-Indigenous 
[people] think of hunting — you know, as 
just a weekend off,” Browne explains. “I 
realize now it’s more than that for a lot of 
Indigenous communities.” 
It is this sort of story — one that the 
company policy didn’t account for and 
told to a stranger behind a closed door — 
that ends up mattering more than anything 
in that company’s PAIR application. “That’s 
where you find out who’s walking the walk 
and who’s just doing the talk,” Browne says.
That sentence comes close to describing 
the work of everyone who keeps the PAIR 
program running. PAIR, CCIB’s certifica-
tion program for corporate Indigenous 
relations, depends on a small number of 
trainers, facilitators and verifiers whose 
expertise is almost impossible to capture 
in a rubric. It’s about knowing which ques-
tion makes a room go quiet, which detail 
in a story is the real and important one, 
and which company’s leadership is just 
“performing” commitment and which one 
really means it.
Indigenous Business Report spoke 
to a handful of people working with 
CCIB on its PAIR certification process. 
Here, they share their insights on the 
program, their contributions to it, and 
what makes it work as well as it does.
TOM BROWNE  
The accidental verifier
“We don’t want to 
make [PAIR] too 
comfortable. We want 
people to be aware 
and experience some 
discomfort about 
what was done.”
Tom Browne came to his PAIR work 
as a verifier sideways. A retired pulp-
and-paper engineer from Montréal, 
he ended up reviewing grant applica-
tions for the federal Indigenous Forest 
Initiative. By his own account, he was 
the only non-Indigenous person on 
the panel. He had gained the position 
after a colleague suggested his name 
for a seat she could not fill. Luanne 
Whitecrow, PAIR’s program director, 
called him not long after, and he has 
been verifying companies for PAIR 
ever since.
Browne is candid about what he brings 
to the role, and what he doesn’t. “My 
encounters with Indigenous people 
within the PAIR program are with the 
employees of the company that is 
applying and with the communities 
that they work with,” he says. 
Browne is aware that some applicants 
choose him from CCIB’s verifier roster 
precisely because his background 
is corporate and technical, and not 
Indigenous. What he has learned to 
listen for requires patience more than 
a shared background. It’s about the 
difference between a CEO’s polished 
PowerPoint presentation and what 
the same company’s own staff say 
once the door is closed. “It really is 
the Indigenous employees that carry 
a lot of weight in saying this company 
is real or it’s just doing it for the sticker,” 
he says.
Browne is equally candid about his own 
reckoning. He wasn’t born in Canada, 
and he can’t claim personal respon-
sibility for residential schools, but he 
M o r e  t h a n  j u s t  a  ch e ck l i s t  o f  a ch i e v e m e n t s ,  PA I R 
s u c c e e d s  b e c a u s e  o f  t h e  m a n y  t a l e n t e d  p r o fe s s i o n a l s 
i n v o l v e d  i n  t h e  p r o c e s s
By Bryan Hansen

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