Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the comments the Minister has made, but I recognize the fact that forestry operations do a good job in fighting fire and protecting our forests, and that does not necessarily mean that there can't be improvements. Each year, across the territories, they base water bombers in Yellowknife, Fort Smith and various places. In many people's opinion, if they were to send out one or two water bombers to make one or two trips and kill a fire rather than sending the same two water bombers on a hundred trips to try to fight a fire after it has gotten away, it makes good economic sense.
Mr. Chairman, I am sure Renewable Resources people in the game management part of the department will recognize the fact that certain animals are victims of habit. They continue to migrate through a certain area if the conditions are right. I am sure many Members here will recognize the fact that caribou, for example, will not cross an area that has been burned. They don't cross that for 25 years. In some areas near Fort Smith, when I was a child, we saw caribou all the time, before fires had gone through. You never saw a caribou in there again because fire burns off the lichen as well as the stuff that they eat. Caribou will not cross a burn. It doesn't matter how old this thing is until there is much regrowth. That takes many years. So, these two things fit together. Using the caribou migration as an example that have fixed patterns, if there is an area that has a fire, no matter how small it is, it kills the lichens in that area, there is going to be no caribou, regardless of whether it is an area that is outside of where a trapper has his trap line. The caribou just don't go into the trapper's area.
Those kinds of things are areas of concern that people certainly want expressed. I am sure they have been expressed before. They will be expressed again. I think this is a forum to let the department know both, what kind of a good job they are doing and, as well, to express the areas of concern by the people who are affected by it.
I don't expect any kind of major changes from this debate, but I think the other area I wanted to touch on when it comes to forest fire management is the fact that it is becoming very mechanized. There used to be a time when they had many fire crews. People in the community would be trained to fight fire and taken out to fires where they fought them by hand; a great deal of work that people in seasonal occupations depended on, they trapped in the winter and went out and fought fires in the summer. They would go battle these things and there was some pocket money there, enough to get them over the tough times -- like farmers in the prairies working as welders during the winter time -- not in their main occupation, but in some other area.
Subsequently, we've become very mechanized now. We have water bombers all over the place and we spend a tremendous amount of money. I got some information on the amount of money we spend on water bombers to fight these fires. We have DC6s and CL-215s, and each of these planes require a fire crew. There is nobody here in the territories who own these things. They even bring birdogs from the south. Helicopters and water bombers are brought in from the south. Where local people are wanting employment in what could have been considered a traditional area, they are now being unemployed because of money going to southern companies that own this equipment.
While I recognize that we need to keep up with the times and have the necessary equipment to fight this problem, we are moving away from what used to be traditional areas. I just wanted to bring to the attention of the Minister, through you, Mr. Chairman, that people are concerned about it. The business community in the north is also concerned that a lot of equipment is being brought in to fight fires and contracts are going to southern firms -- in BC for example -- when there are a lot of planes and helicopters here in the north that could provide that same service. They seem to be locked into a pattern where if you hire the water bomber, you also have to hire the birdog from the same company, or a related company. We have good northern businesses that need that kind of work.
I also wanted to use this forum to point that out. Perhaps the Minister has other information, Mr. Chairman, that contradicts what I'm saying, but my information is we spend a lot of money on both fixed and rotary winged equipment to fight fires that are not of Northwest Territories business connection. I want to point that out. Thank you.