Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It has been a long time that I stood in this House and talked about the commercial fishing industry on Great Slave Lake. Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased that our government, our Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment has seen fit to hold that consultation with the Fisherman’s Federation that resulted in the vote to begin the actions required to remove the Great Slave Fishery in the Northwest Territories from the purview of the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation. Mr. Speaker, it took a long time to get consensus amongst the fishers themselves. Unfortunately, we have seen this industry deteriorate from when about two million pounds of whitefish per year were being harvested from Great Slave Lake to now where we are lucky if we pull out 200,000 pounds of whitefish from Great Slave Lake.
Mr. Speaker, as you know, this was such a viable part of the economy of Hay River for so many years and we are looking forward to returning to that. This is healthy food on our doorstep. I don’t think there is enough market in the Northwest Territories, though, to absorb all of the fish. So of course the issue of marketing and the cross-border implications of exporting our fish are all matters that will need to be dealt with as we come up with a new plan for marketing the fish from the Northwest Territories.
But I would like to commend this Minister. As I said, this has been an ongoing area of concern for a number of years. It has hit rock bottom in terms of the amount of people who are participating in the fishery and the benefit we realize from this sustainable excellent food source, and I would like to commend this Minister of ITI for being the one
who put the vote to the fishermen and then the fishermen finding the courage to decide to withdraw even though they aren’t entirely sure and that it’s not clearly spelled out yet what the alterative is for them to harvest and market their fish from Great Slave Lake. I’m referring to Great Slave Lake, obviously, because I am from Hay River, but I know the fishery expands beyond Hay River. So I would like to take this opportunity to commend the Minister and I will have further questions about next steps going forward during question period. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
