Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This past weekend was Thanksgiving and we have now convened the House and I’d like to take the opportunity to draw to everyone’s attention to the vast resources and wealth of the Northwest Territories that we should be extremely thankful for.
As we listen to the news every day, we hear of countries that are inundated with natural disasters, typhoons, mud slides, with horrendous results. When you look at a map of Canada or a map of the world, you see that we are subject to very little in the way of those kinds of disasters that could potentially affect us.
Mr. Speaker, when I think of the resources of our land, I can’t help but think that there is more that we should be able to do to sustain ourselves from those resources. Yesterday I made mention of our vast non-renewable resources by way of oil and gas.
Today, and maybe for the rest of this session, I want to talk a little bit about some of the renewable resources that we have that we seem incapable of really benefitting from in any kind of significant way. In a time when the world contemplates things like the availability of fresh water, we have the Great Slave Lake and the Great Bear Lake, vast bodies of clean, fresh water on our doorstep. In those waters are fish resources. I know the Great Slave Lake better in that regard and I know what the sustainable harvest is available from the Great Slave Lake, and yet we do not seem to be able to harvest that in a meaningful way to even support and feed our own people this very healthy and
nutritious food source. Instead, we import things from far away.
When we look at the downturn in the caribou, but yet if you drive south of here, you know, you can see the bison standing on the highway, thousands and thousands of them. What a wonderful food source and yet we seem to, again, overlook that and think that we should import our food from some faraway place.
Our forests, our long summer days, the light, ideal for growing conditions and agriculture, the sustainable harvest of product for biomass.
Mr. Speaker, this is just a brief touching on some of these things, but over the next days of session here I want to zero in on some of these things and we need to ask ourselves why can we not benefit more greatly from these things on our doorstep. Thank you.