Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will be supporting the motion and I appreciate my colleague bringing this forward.
There are, indeed, commercial opportunities out there. I myself have picked mushrooms commercially in the Northwest Territories and sold them here. There is a market out there. There are a number of species of mushrooms, several types of morels and pine mushrooms of note, matsutakes, which are very well known to the Japanese tourists that we have and are highly valued. Even to have one of those at Thanksgiving, or the equivalent of Thanksgiving, is a big deal and worth a lot. There are also various types of boletes and so on.
We know that these wild mushrooms have incredible nutritional value, some of them actually the same as dried meat in their dried form, so
there’s an incredible nutritional value from these mushrooms.
However, it’s not necessarily easy because they’re not necessarily dependable crops. They vary quite a bit from year to year, over time and according to the conditions and so on, so it does take a particular type of entrepreneur, and really, wild crafters generally that make use of non-timber forest products can slot this into their bailiwick of different products that they can access when they are available so this sort of thing can provide tinctures and herbs and aromatics, serve the health and cosmetic industry as so on, as well as the nutritional industry and the gourmet food industry. In fact, we have several operating Weledeh entrepreneurs in this area right now so it does really require some oversight.
I appreciate that this motion in the House finally does call for this. The first call was through committee five years ago now, and with repeated intervals of calling for it from the various Ministers, with no action. I guess calling for it on an interim basis might be the best we can do and I’ll be supporting that, but really we need a thorough response. Mahsi.