Right now the only solution we have is to talk about getting rid of the Freshwater Fish Marketing Act and the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation. It's something you'd have to prepare for years in advance. Our plants would all have to upgrade first and you'd have to start to develop markets well in advance of even thinking about such a change. I know at times it seems that they're not serving us very well. The prices aren't as high as we'd like, but that's something we need to plan with a view to the future, probably ten years down the road.
I was talking earlier about the lack of harbours in our area. There are many opportunities for commercial fisheries in the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and right across. There's a lot of water out there and a lot of potential to produce fish. We're probably under-producing in the freshwater area by six or seven million pounds a year. That would be a conservative estimate. If we were to start to use some of the species that we're throwing away, it would probably be three or four times that. A lot of these fisheries are not accessible right now, because the infrastructure isn't in place to access those fisheries. These are some of the things that fishers in our area would like to see addressed. The budget doesn't allow for it right now, but we hope that one day down the road it will.
Because the program has been geared towards the upkeep of the harbours we have right now, the percentage of money going to the central Arctic is small. We've always had fewer harbours, and our harbours are smaller and easier to maintain. Our percentage is small, and the chances of getting those harbours in the other places doesn't seem likely in the near future, except when there's a political push as there was for the Pangnirtung project. That's millions of dollars, and it's not counted in the budgets we talked about today.
There has to be a lot of political pressure to get a new harbour built. We're trying to maintain the old harbours, but for the new ones there needs to be political pressure and funds have to be set aside. That would have to be outside the core funding that we're talking about now.