Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’ve been talking a lot in this House about the cost of living. A big part of the cost of living is the cost of food. We have on our doorstep a huge renewable resource of very healthy food in the form of the fish in the Great Slave Lake. Every year there is a quota on that lake to harvest, and it is sustainable: 1.2 million pounds of fish. That’s way more than we need to feed all the people in the Northwest Territories. But we bring our fish that we eat most of the time, if we admit it, in some box with Captain Highliner on it from some faraway fish processing plant, maybe even on the East Coast. There is something seriously wrong with this picture.
As long as I have been an MLA I have been talking about the challenges of the commercial fishery on Great Slave Lake. Honestly, I am getting so tired of talking about it that after I’m finished as MLA I might just go buy a boat and go fish it myself, because I cannot seem to get this government’s attention on this.
We have been saddled with the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation for too long. This government has taken a sideline approach to that and said, well, if the fishermen want us to pull out of freshwater, we will. But the fact of the matter is the fishermen are very busy doing other things. The fishermen are called upon to be employers, they have to be accountants, they have to do payroll for their men, they have to be mechanics to maintain their boats, and they have to go out and do that very, very hard task of actually doing the commercial fishing. They are expected to do a lot of things and I don’t really think we can ask them to also go out and look for the market for their fish, although I take my hat off to those private vendors who park their trucks with fresh fish on the parking lots of our grocery stores in downtown Yellowknife and sell fish to us.
But when do I eat fish out of Great Slave Lake? Do you know when I eat it? When I have company and I want to show off. Put the beautiful white fish on the barbeque and show off. The rest of the time we don’t take advantage of this extremely high quality, nutritious food. So when we talk about the cost of living, I think it’s a win-win situation if we could do more as a government to come up with an NWT marketing corporation for the fish. The government should step in on this and go in on it whole hog. Wrong expression.
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That’s another whole story. But the government needs to become more proactive in helping to create the jobs from this fishery, create the food, the access to good food, quality food for northern people. I’ll have questions for the Minister of ITI on this today.