Right, absolutely.
The very first thing, of course, is having access to fish, because it's a little difficult to teach fishing without access to fish. Once we get access to fish, that then helps a lot of other programs that we want to do. For example, in Quidi Vidi yesterday, we partnered with Mallard Cottage and Wandering Pavilion and held free sessions on filleting fish and cooking up your fish. We also do other kinds of outreach programs like that, because besides fish being a commodity, it's our cultural food and it's related to food security. People in Newfoundland and Labrador, we find, don't know how to process their fish from whole fish anymore, or even how to cook it up.
Talking about some of the programs like fill-in-the-blank to plate, there are fish-to-schools programs, for example, that we would like to get involved in somehow, but again we don't have the fish. Fish is not served in Newfoundland schools, so what can we do to try to get young people in Newfoundland and Labrador to eat fish? As you can see, if you've driven around here, Newfoundland is probably not going to have a lot of cow ranches, so we're probably not going to be big beef-eaters. The protein we're going to have to count on in the future is seafood.
Food security is an issue. Ninety per cent of our food comes in on a ferry, and in three days we're counting on “storm chips”, and that's not really a very good thing to do. Getting folks to “eat local” and to eat local seafood is very important. Introducing that to young people is why we do events of the kind we did yesterday, when we had our staff go out and give filleting lessons. We get the kids involved in that and then partner up to show how to cook up your fish. Getting fish to schools is important, so it's about finding a way to do that, but we need the fish. There's even doing something like partnering with schools in Toronto to have the kids catch it here and then have the schools in Toronto prepare it, and they would have this whole cultural exchange. There are all kinds of things we could do, but until we get the fish we can't get started.
Also, there's one thing I noticed as we were talking about training for fishing. I've been getting some training for fishing so that I can do this. Besides being the representative, the grant writer, the bookkeeper, and all of that, I'm also a boat captain, and I'm going to fishing school. I'm at the marine institute, and oftentimes I'm the only woman in class. That's a concern. A number of the Canada summer jobs students we hired this past summer were young women, and they're interested in fishing. We thought we would start a Girls Who Fish program. That's for young women aged 8 to 80.
Sorry, old white guys around the table, but our heritage doesn't belong just to old white guys around the table: it belongs to youth and women too, because that's also important. When we engage everybody in a conversation, we start coming up with new ways to solve these very tangly problems.