I would say they are two separate things: a traditional fishery versus a recreational fishery. A recreational fishery, to me, is a fishery where folks like us would go up and pay money for a licence, as clearly some of the best fishing in the world is in the north.
You can't really look at the traditional fisheries in the Arctic from a monetary dollar value and gauge their importance. They would pale in comparison to many of the fisheries in the south. But if you look at the food value or the value that it brings into those communities, you would have to multiply it tenfold or a hundredfold. The difference in being able to harvest seals is clearly an issue of importance to this committee and to Canada, and it is fundamentally important to many of these communities. The ability to be able to harvest those marine mammals and to be able to put traditional or comfort foods on the table is the difference between being able to have a family that is self-sufficient or a family that is in dire straits.
The sense of community involvement is unlike what I'm used to in eastern Canada, where you'll have fishing parties go out. These are traditional fisheries done at the community level. They work as a local unit. Obviously, the proceeds of that are shared across the community or across communities. The success of the community is shared even with the elders and those who are old or infirm and are not necessarily able to prosecute that themselves, and they benefit because they look after everybody. So it's very important to look at the traditional fisheries and what it means to the community and what it means to the Inuit from a cultural perspective.
Obviously, the recreational fisheries provide much needed economic input to the communities, but it would be of a secondary nature. If we were into issues of conservation concerns or anything like that, we would first look after the traditional fisheries, and then we'd look at the commercial recreational fisheries as a secondary item.