Thank you, Mr. Chair. I, too, have similar issues, but not dealing with mushrooms, I’m talking more of natural products that people use for thousands of years where they make dry meat and dry fish. They basically pick berries in the fall time, they freeze it, keep it for the winter, it gets them through the whole season. Yet those traditional activities still go on in all our communities and there is a commercial market, but most if it is mostly through trade and barter and so if you want dry fish you go and see so and so, if you want dry meat you go see so and so. Through our local economies people sell this stuff internally, but there is a commercial potential for this type of small business. You go to, you know, it’s surprising, you got to airports in Scandinavia and you can see reindeer hides being sold at their airport. You see cans of cloudberries sold at their airports, blueberries, any type of product we over here take for granted, but there is a commercial opportunity there for a lot of our small communities by way of marketing this stuff. I know that a lot of times we talk about the commercial harvesting. I mean, especially in the commercial fishing industry, the Mackenzie Delta
has probably the best potential for whitefish in regard to that market, but the economics is not there. Again, if you do it right, people who go fishing on the Mackenzie at the Arctic Red, these guys bring 3,000 to 6,000 fish out every fall just from fishing for two weeks and it’s just done to provide fish for themselves and for their dogs or they share it with other trappers and people like that. Again, for us it’s just natural, but I think that realizing that the potential that this segment of our traditional economy had has never been really developed to a marketed product that can actually make money.
I’d just like to know why is it that we seem to be putting a lot of focus on the big stuff -- no offense to the fish market on Great Slave Lake -- but again, I think if we start looking at these potential markets on a smaller scale, regional, maybe move it outwards to the Yukon who are next door to us. There’s people who actually come from the Yukon now in the fall time to Tsiigehtchic purchasing fish off the people locally and taking it back to the Yukon because they realize that the market is there, but again, it’s done just on a Ma and Pa operation type of a business. I think that we have to start thinking how do we market those different aspects from the small entrepreneur and give them the market that they can actually go to. You know, northern stores or people selling these products in the Northern Store, the Co-op or in the Inuvik grocery outlets or down in Whitehorse or wherever, but start getting into those different markets and I think that this government, for some reason or another, does not seem to assist in those areas and I think that’s an area we can develop through business grants or whatever and help people expand their business so that they can have the equipment that they need.
I’ll finish off with an elderly lady in Tsiigehtchic. This lady, she goes out to her fish camp every summer. She takes the whole summer, she’s out there for two and a half/three months. She fills up four deep freezes she has outside of her house. Those four deep freezes gets her through the whole winter and all she does is sell fish out of her four deep freezes, and out of that money is how she sustains herself through the whole winter. Everybody knows where to go get dry fish because she has the best dry fish practically in the Delta. She has been able to be independent, self-reliant, sustain herself by four freezers that she fills up every summer and going out to her fish camp. Those are the types of entrepreneurs that I am talking about. Those are the people that we should be working with regarding our business grants, with regard to small business promotion and promote that sector, promote that person. That’s something we don’t seem to do a good job of and that’s something we have to start working on when you talk about traditional economies. Really make it made-in-the-North business ventures that we would be proud of
and proud of those people that do it for a living. Thank you.