Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to follow up in my Member’s statement today from my colleague from Hay River North’s statement the other day on the commercial fishery, something that’s also very dear to my heart.
Mr. Speaker, the strength of our economy is diversity, and as a government we have no trouble responding with lots of resources to big-ticket industries like oil, gas and diamonds. Today I want to talk about a resource that has too long been virtually ignored.
On our doorstep, literally, we have a world-class product and potential for an amazing commercial fishery. Its renewable, it’s sustainable and its harvest has virtually no negative environmental impacts, but the industry continues to shrink. There’s a quota for almost two million pounds of fish and we only harvest about 200,000 pounds per year. The market mechanism which we seem married to indefinitely is dysfunctional and detrimental to the well-being of those participating in the industry. I hope the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation is listening.
So, Mr. Speaker, I have an idea to revitalize our commercial fishing industry. A few months ago I heard a fisherman being interviewed in Twillingate, Newfoundland, who had been involved in the commercial fishery down there in ocean waters, but the cod stocks had dwindled to the point that he could no longer participate in that. If we can’t find people locally and in the Northwest Territories to do this – it’s hard work, not everybody wants to go out and do this – but people who already know this industry, we should have a campaign to advertise, or to go down to Newfoundland where people have been involved in a commercial fishery their whole lives and then invite them to come back here.
When we didn’t have diamond cutters, we went to Armenia to get diamond cutters over here so we could keep our secondary diamond processing industry going here in the Northwest Territories. Surely we could figure out a way to attract some commercial fishermen to fish our Great Slave Lake out here to create some industry.
It could be an industry that’s worth $10 million to our economy here in the Northwest Territories, but we can’t figure it out. We keep looking to a handful – and God bless them – of aging and getting-more-tired commercial fishermen that are out on this lake. There’s a handful of them. Do you want to be part of the marketing corporation? Don’t you? They take votes.
Hey, let’s think outside the box here. Let’s look at the industry as it sits there and let’s find a creative way to revitalize it, and if that means going to Newfoundland and recruiting some people, let’s do it. Let’s get ‘er done. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
