Thank you, Mr. Weston.
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
New Brunswick is fortunate to be geographically situated along the Atlantic Ocean. This offers a multitude of fishing opportunities throughout the year, be it smelt fishing under the ice, followed by the black salmon fishing and angling, and then the return of our sea-running brook trout. As you see, as the seasons move forward, so do the opportunities and different species.
We now have access to striped bass fishing followed by the return of the king of the rivers, our wild Atlantic salmon, which we hope come in big numbers. In the summertime, you can find many New Brunswickers jigging for mackerel or cod off our shores. Inland, we're blessed with many species. We have 22 species of fish, and the New Brunswick Wildlife Federation has a master angler program whereby we monitor angling throughout the province. Anglers are asked to send pictures of released fish, so we try to get the weights and lengths of different species that we have under this program, those being eel, Atlantic salmon, land-locked salmon, brook trout, catfish, and many others.
All of these fishing opportunities are steeped in tradition, and they all have a very important economic value to our province—that is, people are building cottages along waterways and building camps and buying boating equipment, as well as fishing and angling equipment. The Atlantic Salmon Federation had Gardner Pinfold come up with a report in 2010 that showed that the Atlantic salmon alone was worth $255 million and provided 3,800 full-time equivalent jobs in eastern Canada. That was in 2010. That's just one species for which we were able to get the exact figures, and if you would combine all the other species we have in our province, you could see how important financially these fish are.
The biggest threat to recreational fishing in my mind would be the environment. We have climate change that we have no control of—well, that's disputable. Whether or not we have control of it, we should try to do better as humans. If we are having an impact on climate change, we should be having better practices. Also, we need to protect our rivers. We also need to manage our forestry practices better and to look at other ways of siltation. We have to be very aware of the way we do things around our river systems.
The problem in New Brunswick is that we have invasive species. People are moving fish. It's not a new thing coming in. People have been moving fish, and a lot of the species we have today in our province, such as small-mouth bass, have been introduced. They are moving in waters where historically they have not been, so people are moving fish. In that respect we have our Miramichi Lake, which has small-mouth bass that could be very detrimental to our Atlantic salmon that come to this Miramichi Lake area to spawn. Invasive species are a big problem.
Right now we have a decline in our Atlantic salmon populations. All I'd like to say is that we're doing the best we can. I want to thank Minister Shea for her recent actions of putting a board of very qualified people to look at the situation with the Atlantic salmon stocks and to come up with some immediate action. This year in New Brunswick the Atlantic salmon will all be released and there will be no retention of Atlantic salmon. I know a lot of members of my group harvest. We have a traditional harvesting and our families enjoy this wild fish, but everybody has to contribute. The numbers are low, so we have to contribute in helping the stocks to rise. For that I thank the minister for her insight.
That's about all. I'm very happy to be invited here today to talk about this topic; it's important to our province. I hope that in your deliberation you may find some ways to help.