Canada needs to boost the size of a federal loan program for Indigenous groups to better reflect the scale of energy projects the country is pursuing, says Candace Laing, president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

“When you look at the opportunities over the next decade, we don’t think that it’s at anywhere near where it needs to be,” she said Wednesday at the Spark Indigenous Energy Summit on Tsuut’ina Nation, west of Calgary.

The program offers loan guarantees to Indigenous groups to gain equity in businesses and major projects such as oil pipelines. The federal government has allocated C$10 billion ($7.2 billion) to the initiative. Laing said some projections suggest Indigenous ownership in proposed projects will be as much as C$50 billion.

“Our policy recommendation is we need to up the loan authority level on that to at least C$35 billion at the federal level to even come into the zone of what we need in terms of the access to capital and funds to support ownership,” she said.

The program’s first loan guarantee was issued last year, covering C$400 million of a C$736 million investment by 38 First Nations in British Columbia for a 12.5% stake in Enbridge Inc.’s Westcoast pipeline system.

Provincial governments have their own similar initiatives. Prime Minister Mark Carney said last month that Indigenous communities will be offered a minimum 10% ownership interest in a proposed oil pipeline to the west coast through Canada and Alberta’s loan guarantee programs.

The federal government has also long said it wanted to have an Indigenous stake in the government-owned Trans Mountain Corp. pipeline, and in September offered a 15% stake in the expanded conduit.