Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my Member’s statement today I talked about the commercial fishery. I speak about Hay River because I know it the best. I know there’s commercial fishery that goes on out of other areas too, including Yellowknife, but, Mr. Speaker, commercial fishing used to be a very big piece of a diversified economy in Hay River. It has dwindled down now to the point that I think we were talking this year about selling fishing licences, commercial fishing licences to people who are not even residents of the Northwest Territories.
Mr. Speaker, there are many challenges, no doubt, with the fishing industry, but with the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation I’m starting to agree with Mr. Alex Morin in Hay River: it was legislated poverty. With the costs of everything going up, diesel and labour and cost of equipment for the
fishermen, that those costs can go up, but the prices were low. No wonder the prices were low when we want to haul it all the way to Winnipeg, Manitoba, and store it in some deep freeze and then try and market it as a good and valuable product. We have an industry here which could be self-contained in the Northwest Territories but, like I said, the fishermen cannot be all things and I think that we should get away from the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation and this government should set up some kind of a cooperative that allows a fisherman to sell and even process their fish so that they can make a decent living on it and commercial fishing can once again become a viable industry in the Northwest Territories in its rightful place. What has the Minister of ITI got in mind to achieve that? Thank you.