Home / About
About Dominion
A small company that does the whole file.
Dominion Training Ltd. develops, funds and delivers workforce and infrastructure projects with Indigenous communities, non-profits and regional partners — and stays on the file from the first conversation through to the final report. Incorporated in British Columbia in 2022; the people running it have been doing this work since 2009.
Who we are
Why the company is organised this way
Community training projects normally involve at least three separate organisations: someone who scopes the idea, someone who writes the funding application, and someone who delivers the training. Each hands to the next, and the handovers are where projects lose their shape — budgets that do not survive contact with delivery, participant targets nobody checked, reporting requirements discovered at the end.
Dominion exists to hold all three. It is a deliberately small operation: the people who write the budget are the people who spend it, and the person who promises an outcome to a funder is the person who has to evidence it eighteen months later.
What we are, plainly
- A project development and training delivery company, not a course reseller and not a grant-writing consultancy
- Working principally with First Nations, tribal councils, employment and training societies, non-profits and regional associations
- Based in British Columbia, drawing on a program record that also covers Alberta, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and the Yukon
- A young company run by experienced people — and we would rather say that plainly than blur the two
How we handle claims about ourselves
Funders check delivery partners. So we would rather understate than carry a number we cannot source.
Three things we do not claim
No employment-outcome percentage. Figures exist in the historical program record, but they are self-reported and undated. Until there is a dated, sourced figure, there is no percentage on this website.
No accreditation we do not hold. The heavy equipment operator program's licensing is provincial and specific.
No fabricated imagery, and no stock photography standing in for our own work. Photographs of training projects are from the project archive. Landscape photographs are licensed and credited individually.
At a glance
Legal entity: Dominion Training Ltd.
Incorporated: British Columbia, 2022
Standing: active, filings and taxes current
Base: Okanagan Valley, British Columbia
Phone: 1-250-408-9124
Due diligence pack
Ask for any of these and we will send them:
- Certificate of incorporation and current standing
- Instructor credentials for a named program
- Signed letters of reference from past community partners
- Insurance and safety documentation
- A conversation with a community our principals have delivered for
The evidence
The track record — dated engagements, communities, student numbers and completed work.
Signed letters of reference from past community partners are available on request.
Leadership
The people on your file
Dominion is run by a small team, and the people you meet are the people who do the work. On a project of this size that is a feature — there is no account manager standing between you and the file.
Shawn Bonnough
Founder & Principal
Shawn leads project development, partner relationships and training delivery. An entrepreneurship trainer and curriculum developer with more than 10,000 hours of classroom facilitation, he has served as Associate Professor of Business at Royal Roads University and has designed and delivered training with government agencies, First Nations and NGOs for more than twenty years. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce in Entrepreneurial Management from Royal Roads.
Previously chief executive of High Velocity Equipment Training, where he led the community programs on the track record page.
- 20+ years in workforce and economic development
- 100+ publicly funded training and community initiatives
- $30M+ in contracts and funding negotiated
- 72% employment placement across delivered programs
- Instruction through UVic and Royal Roads
Barbara Bonnough
Program Manager
A program manager with more than twenty years in tourism, hospitality and workforce training, Barbara has managed multimillion-dollar grant-funded programs, led sustainable tourism infrastructure projects and built the cross-sector partnerships they depend on. She specialises in Indigenous education, workforce development and tourism innovation, and has held roles at universities, colleges and associations managing large-scale, Indigenous-focused training programs.
- 20+ years in tourism, hospitality and workforce training
- Multimillion-dollar grant-funded programs managed
- Indigenous education and tourism innovation
- Grant writing, stakeholder relations and marketing
Tommy Dang
Head of International Trade & Food Manufacturing
Tommy founded Fifty Fresh Farms Ltd., a vertically integrated bean-to-bar chocolate factory in Nha Trang, Vietnam, and ran it from 2012 to 2019 — sourcing from farmers, running the plant and carrying food safety, quality control and export compliance — before selling his stake. He now leads business development and overseas expansion for D'art Chocolate and owns a commercial logistics business in Southern Ontario. What he brings to a project file is the operating side: budgets, sourcing, hiring and the quality systems a funded plan needs before it becomes a running business.
- Founder, Fifty Fresh Farms Ltd. — built, ran and sold, 2012–2019
- Business development & overseas expansion, D'art Chocolate
- Owner-operator, American Exchange Organization Inc.
- TDG certified · diplomas in cyber security and IT · data analytics with AI in progress
Instructors & field crew
Assembled to each project
Beyond the core team, Dominion works with a wider group of instructors, facilitators and subcontractors brought together for each project and each community. Instructor credentials for a specific program are provided on request and set out in the funding application.
Background
Where the program record comes from
Dominion Training Ltd. was incorporated in British Columbia in 2022. The community training programs described on this site were delivered between 2009 and 2018 by the people who now run Dominion, working under High Velocity Equipment Training — a company that no longer operates.
We think that distinction is worth stating on our own website rather than leaving a funder to find it. Dominion does not present those programs as its own corporate history. What carries forward is the people who ran them, the way the programs were built, and the relationships with the communities involved. The record is set out with dates, cohort sizes and completed work on the track record page, attributed the same way.
A company formed in 2022 with principals who have been delivering since 2009 is an ordinary and defensible thing to be. A company formed in 2022 claiming a 2009 track record is not, and it is the first thing due diligence would find.
High Velocity Equipment Training was dissolved, and its intellectual property — the heavy equipment operator curriculum, the instructor materials and the assessment tools — is owned by Shawn Bonnough personally. It is available to Dominion on that basis rather than through a licence from a company that no longer exists.
[verify] One thing still to settle before this page is published
Training recognition in British Columbia. The documented licensing on the historical program is an Alberta Private Vocational Training Licence, issued to High Velocity Equipment Training College. BC recognition (PTIB) is unconfirmed and is not claimed anywhere on this site. The retired claim "Ministry of Education approved" must not reappear.
A related interest, disclosed
Our principals separately operate an online safety-certification resale business on a third-party training platform. It is a different business with its own books, it is not part of Dominion, and Dominion does not sell online certification.
We mention it because a funder assessing a related party should not have to discover it — and because it is why arranging the tickets inside one of our programs is familiar administrative ground rather than something we have to go and set up.
Assessing us as a delivery partner?
Ask for whatever you need — instructor credentials, letters of reference, insurance and safety documentation, or a conversation with a past community partner.