Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is a message from concerned constituents of mine.
I have been approached to deliver a message on behalf of a group of concerned constituents who live in my riding and some of my colleagues’ ridings too.
Here is what they want to say: We are small but not insignificant. We are not known for our beauty, but we have great taste. We are probably the only constituents in the NWT that are happy we had an epic fire season. We may be just a bunch of fungi living in the forest, but we have a message that is deadly serious. Okay, well, maybe not as deadly as amanita, but you get the point.
Have you figured out who we are yet? We are few, the proud, the Morels! There are some things that you might not know about us. We belong to a genus of edible mushrooms with a distinctive honeycomb-like appearance. We have been called by many different names, depending on where we grow. Some call us dry land fish because, when sliced lengthwise, we’re breaded and fried and we just look like the shape of a fish. In Kentucky, they call us hickory chickens and merkels, meaning miracles, because we once saved a mountain family from starvation.
In West Virginia we are known as molly moochers. Don’t ask us why. That one makes us laugh. We are also known as sponge mushrooms. If you know what we look like, that one makes sense. In fact, the word “morel” itself is derived from the Latin word for maurus, meaning brown.
Okay, now for the serious part. We are prized by gourmet cooks, especially for French cuisine. We are hunted by thousands of people every year for our great taste and the joy of the hunt. We know we have commercial value, and even though we are just a bunch of fungi living in the forest, we like to be good neighbours, so we need your help.
Mr. Nadli tells us that you are the people that make the laws. So get busy, make a law to protect us from the greedy scavengers who travel great distances to find us where we grow. They will come and pick us, and even though we are growing on your land, you will get no benefits from us being here.
Come on, people! You scratch our backs. No way, that won’t work because we don’t have backs. But you know what we mean, just do it. How hard can it be? Pass a law and make sure that we stay strong, growing, and you get some benefit from us growing on your land. Thanks to Mr. Nadli for writing this down. We don’t have hands.
---Laughter
A big mahsi for the morels. Mahsi.