Landing a dream job
Javed Sommers shares how the CPA designation gave him a purpose-filled career at Indigenous Services Canada
When Javed Sommers CPA, CMA started working at Indigenous Services Canada in 2014, he didn’t immediately realize serving the First Nations community would become his lifelong calling. Early that same year, while pursuing his accounting designation, Javed attended a Truth and Reconciliation Commission event that ended up defining his career.
“I had a little awareness of the history of colonialism, but as a white settler, I didn’t understand that colonialism is a contemporary reality that First Nations continue to face,” says Javed.
The insights he gained from the eye-opening event compelled him to learn more about the relationships between settlers and First Nations. Immediately after successfully obtaining his designation, Javed applied to the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta to pursue his master’s degree in Native Studies.
Javed is now the Field Manager of First Nations Relations for Treaty 6 West at Indigenous Services Canada, and his skills as a CPA are the perfect complement to his Native Studies education. His team works with ten First Nations communities located west of Edmonton. Their primary responsibility is to manage relations around the funding agreements each First Nation has with Canada; these funding agreements facilitate the services provided on reserves such as education, social assistance, community infrastructure, and health care.
Javed credits his designation as the key to landing his dream job. “One thing I noticed after attaining the designation was the amount of respect I received in terms of people looking to me for my opinion and analysis. In the past six years, I have held 11 roles within my department, and four of them have been substantive roles,” he says. “Very quickly, this has become what I want to spend my life doing, and I am very happy I ended up at Indigenous Services Canada.”
The same realizations that inspired Javed to pursue his master’s degree in Native Studies are the same ones that drive him in his work. “I am passionate about working towards fiscal relationships between Canada and First Nations that are based on treaty relationships. A critical element of treaties is that relationships between settlers and First Nations should be mutually beneficial. Sadly, we are a long way from seeing that reality, but it is what I intend to work towards for the rest of my career.”