Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Chief John Smith of the Tlowitisis First Nation.
I was born in a fishing community, and in my lifetime I have seen two major fisheries that are no longer fisheries, Rivers Inlet and Knight Inlet, which were major fisheries for our people of the village. Every one of the men there had a gillnet boat. That's how they made their living. Then we all moved away from our village. There was a diaspora that took place, and it ended in about 1970. We haven't had a village since then, so we've now bought a piece of land in Campbell River. It's being turned into a reserve by the government. We're trying to build a new community.
To raise income, we've become part of the fish farm industry. We didn't just come right into it. I didn't support it at first, until I did some studies and talked to some very smart people, and we made a relationship with Grieg Seafood. They are only there because they respect our title and they treat our people with a respect that I've never seen before, as the Norwegians have treated me since I met them before we had fish farms.
Now we're fairly well invested. We're not on any sockeye routes with our farms. We have three farms, and we're looking for another one or two more. That would be very nice.
Our fish aren't very good killers, because the farms in the archipelago have been there for over 30 years and they haven't done the good job that they keep saying they've been doing. I'm not sold that the farmed fish are that much of a harmful thing to the wild stocks. We haven't noticed it in our area either.
I think that people have to give it a thought. We haven't had farmed food fish from the Fraser stocks either for two years, and we're going to have to rely on something, but if they keep closing our farms, where's the fish going to come from?
A lot of people like to eat fish. I'm not one of those people who likes to cut off my nose to spite my face. We have to learn to accept changes in things because the footprint that farming fish leaves is very small, smaller than raising chickens. I hope that people will start to realize that you can't just keep blaming something and not understand what we're faced with.
We have a big bunch of other fish to fry. The seal populations are just ridiculous. The sea lion populations are just ridiculous. We don't know how far global warming is going to go on its destructive path.
I'm sure we all want to have everything the same, but it can't be that way. I have to let you know, however, that if you eat sushi and you eat salmon in Ottawa, where some of you people are, it will be farmed fish. There's a restaurant I go to once in a while. Apparently Mr. Trudeau goes there too, so he's been eating farmed fish if he's been eating salmon.