Thank you, and thank you to the committee here this morning. Thank you for inviting us to Ottawa. I appreciate your inviting us to this fisheries committee.
My name is Lootie Toomasie, and I am from Qikiqtarjuaq on Broughton Island in Nunavut. I also was the mayor for 12 years, and I finished my term back in 2006. I have been to different standing committees like this in Parliament a few times before. I'm here with the fisheries committee this time. Thank you very much for giving us this opportunity, and anybody else as well.
Harry Earle is with me this morning, and he is our fisheries adviser.
My community is located along the Davis Strait in central Baffin Island. It's a small community of 550 people, but everything we need for a community is there. We have health centres, wireless Internet, and all that.
We don't have everything that we need, actually. Just to open my statement, my community has had a fishing quota for a long time but has never reached a benefit. I'll describe that once I go through my statement. We don't get a benefit at all, even though we have had a quota for some time now.
All the fishing boats went to Greenland that were fishing in the Davis Strait. That means there were 12,000 tonnes going to Greenland that we suspect should have been landed in Canada. They should have been landed in Canada, but they were landed there, because we don't have a port, as simple as it is.
That's a long story, but I'll make it short.
Once again, we need facilities up in the Arctic. In my community, we are closest to where the fish stocks are located right now, and that means...[Inaudible--Editor]. If you look at the map, if you have maps, we are closest to where most of the fish are. I am speaking about my community, and I'm trying to be very specific in what I say. I mentioned 12,000 tonnes that go to Greenland and that don't get landed in Canada, and that we don't get the benefit for.
Let's go to small craft harbours. Right now we have a small craft harbour that only fits small domestic boats, community boats, but it needs expansion.
As I mentioned in my introduction, I was mayor for 12 years. I have been involved in this issue from the beginning. Back in 1981 I was involved in how our community would lobby to have this small craft harbour and how it should be built at that time. It is too small now to have those fishing boats come in. So we need to upgrade and expand our current small craft harbour.
This is in the plan now. It is the cheapest small craft harbour that has been planned in those seven communities at this moment. It will only cost $2 million. In comparison, costs for other communities are much higher.
As I mentioned, it is in the plan now. This past summer, Government of Nunavut representatives, I believe they were, were in my community to survey what is required and what they will need to know before they build the expansion. They built the lighting system this summer and past fall. That's the only thing that has happened so far on this plan.
Even though so far we have fishing boats coming into our community, they anchor their boats in the channel. We live on the island, but the mainland is on the other side. They anchor their boats because we don't have a small craft harbour that fits.
I'm sorry, I think I have gone beyond five minutes, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you.