Good morning.
Welcome to Manitoba and the community of Gimli.
I'll give you a bit of background on the Manitoba Commercial Inland Fishers Federation.
We have 12 boards of directors that represent different regions in this province. We have one chairman, so we're a board of 13. We bring the concerns and issues of the commercial fishing industry to the table and discuss the issues.
As Mr. Robert Kristjanson explained, there's no doubt the harbours are in need. There is also their maintenance. We need more. We just can't stay at the status quo. We don't have a harbour in our community, in St. Laurent. We'd sure like to have one. The recreational boaters can't launch a boat. We can't launch any deep boats in our community, even for a rescue mission. We've had some challenges just to launch a boat to do a rescue mission on our lake. We have a shallow lake. It's only 20 feet deep. So there are issues with small craft harbours. There is a need for them.
The watersheds span a large geographical area, from 500 miles south of Lake Winnipeg--so they go quite a bit south--to 1,000 to the west, to the Rocky Mountains. So this is a large watershed that drains toward Manitoba and into Lake Winnipeg and also Lake Winnipegosis. Farmers in these rural municipalities have a tremendous amount of authority to drain their farmlands for production of crops or hay land. This practice needs to be reviewed, and that was identified at one of our meetings.
The agriculture industry needs to be held accountable for damages. This type of drainage is cause for concern for water quality. All the natural filtration, the chemicals, phosphorous, pesticides, and herbicides that farmers use on the field end up in rivers and lakes, having an effect on the spawning areas. We identified that as an issue. The fish spawn during the time when the drainage is filled. We see the water dries up after a few days, and the fish are caught up in the streams and have no means of returning to the lake and are killed off, along with the future stock. There needs to be gradual drainage instead of the fast-moving drainage we have today; however, farmers get upset if they see water lying in their fields for more than five days, so there needs to be a review of the drainage system.
There is a need for it, obviously, but at what point do we drain off all the surface water? Where is the volume coming from, and at what point are the lakes going to sustain that coming volume? I think that's also a concern we have to address. The large volume of water flowing in our rivers and in our lakes damages our harbours, and that's a cause for concern. During the winter, we notice the lakes and the rivers are still flowing at high capacity, and the frazil ice builds up, blocks the mouth of the lake, the water backs up and damages our harbours, damages our boats, and floods our roads. We've had these concerns the last four or five years, and it's not going to get better; it's going to get worse.
Those are some of the issues we have dealt with at the commercial fisherman's level. And we know there are challenges we face on how to get attention to this problem. Water quality is also gaining a lot of attention on Lake Winnipeg, but Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipegosis have the same concerns. All the attention is focused here, but again, it all comes back to the idea that if the fishery collapses, the lakes don't support a fishery; then it's easy to point a finger at the harvesters. They're the ones who are easy targets: they overharvested and that's why there's no more fish in the lake. That's why we need the research, the data collected, to make sure the water has the quality to sustain fish, so at least we have some background to say the lake is at a point where it cannot sustain fish or the spawn in those lakes. At least the research needs to be done and the data collected. That's a great concern to us.
We're seeing a crisis situation with low prices in the fishing industry. Fishers are limited to what they can contribute, if anything, during the crisis. Collecting fees to use that harbour: how do you ask a fisher to pay $150 or $100 for docking while you're fishing? The money is not there, and it's a very difficult time to ask them to contribute to support the harbours. Even with tourists, how do you collect from the tourists who use the facility? There's nobody there to collect it, so it's very difficult.
Safety concerns. Entering these harbours during some windstorms...we need the harbours for safety reasons. There are many harbours that have been silted over the years, and dredging programs are needed to improve them. Boats coming in are running aground because of this problem. With high volumes of water, a lot of the silt and sediment builds up, and where it ends up is right at the mouth of the river, and all of a sudden boats are running aground. So we need a dredging program to help those fishermen get out and access the lakes. There have been a few cases where this has happened, especially if it's a drought year and the water in the lakes is down. We're going to see a challenge there in getting access to the lakes through the river systems.
That's about it. I think that covers some of the issues and concerns. And definitely the small craft harbours are in need; we need them. That's about it.