Thank you, Madam Chair. And, you know, I guess I kind of agree with the Member for Great Slave that this is a bad plan. And when you look at this, we're looking at a business model here. We're looking at an industry that pulls off, you know, maybe a million dollars a year, $1.5. We're putting in two point -- we probably put $20 million roughly into a building, we're putting another two point some million dollars into operations, and maybe this is for the first year. Like, it just gets to be -- it gets to be out of whack.

We don't have a lot of fishers out there. But what the fishermen want -- like, I'm from Hay River, I talk to the fishers. There's so many -- there's the number of fishers that are actually with Tu Cho. There's some that aren't, and so I try to talk to everybody there to get a sense of what they want. What do they want? More money. They want more money. If you get more money and then that's hopefully entice new entrance into the market -- I mean, into the industry. But, again, to do that, we need a market. We have to have somebody that's willing to pay more for the fish as well, because right now if -- you know, if we're paying -- like, I don't think we're going to be -- I'm hoping we're not going to be paying $2.2 million a year to operate this thing when we're only pulling off a little over a million dollars of fish a year.

That leaves us very little room to, you know, to put back into it because a lot of that has to go back to the fishers. We've got a lot of work to do here. Like, I guess what we need to do is take a look exactly what the costs are. We need to look at what other costs -- what other funding that we are actually putting into the industry itself as well. Like, we know that there's other money going in from the GNWT. We know there's other money coming in from the federal government. You know, we got a lot of work to do in, you know, upgrading equipment. The winter fishery is very important. Like, without a winter fishery, you know, this plant is probably -- this plant is overkilled. So I guess I just want to make sure that, you know, when we approach and we're spending this type of money that we're doing it right because if -- with the amount we spend, we might be better off just to take that money, divide it up, and just pay the fishermen to stay home each year, is really is what it boils down to it. But we don't want to do that because we have a lake full of fish. We don't have to feed it. It's there waiting to be caught and sold. So, you know, we have to get is it right.

But I think we need to take a look at all the costs, where the money's coming from, whether it's this -- you know, the different departments. We've got training dollars as well. And -- yeah, so my big thing for the fishers, and I've told them and in talking with them, is trying to maximize what they get per pound. And how do we do that? That's the question. And it's hopefully through marketing and getting the fish out there to somebody who is willing to pay a high price for it. Because if they're not willing to pay a high price for it, then, you know, we're just throwing good money after bad. And that industry is in my back yard and I don't want to lose it. Thank you.