Madam Chair, I'd like to start with a gift for the people from the various government parties. I have salmon here that I have carved. These are little salmon that I give to fishers these days. When I fish, I catch a salmon, and I give away a salmon.
In the past, when fishers caught their salmon, they were proud. They would go home with their salmon and show it to their parents. They would eat it over the holidays. It was a moment of great joy. Right now, though, we're dying out. There are no more salmon. It's over. When I have a young fisher catching their first salmon, it's very sad, because they have nothing to bring home. It used to be a rite of passage, and that rite of passage no longer exists.
For that reason, I carve out little salmon and, when a good opportunity presents itself, I give them away. I want the person catching their first salmon to have a keepsake, because that salmon is very important for their emotional side and their cultural side. We're losing the salmon culture, because there are no more salmon to catch. There are fewer and fewer of them.
I have come here today to tell you that we're dying out. The Restigouche River represents 500 jobs and $15 million. We can't afford to lose that. If we lose that, we lose everything.
What's interesting is that the river is good: good for us, the people of the Gaspésie, the people of the Restigouche River, but also good for you.
In my life as a guide, I have guided many people who were politicians, people like you. I have seen that, when you reached the Restigouche River, you were very tense because of your hectic lives. You were even a bit exhausted from all that hustle and bustle. I would see you reaching the river and, already, after one day on the water, I could see that the river was healing you. The river made you feel better. We could sense the tension in your shoulders decreasing. At a certain point, something fantastic would happen: You would touch a salmon, catch a salmon.
Why do people come from all over the world to fish for salmon? I'll explain a fantastic phenomenon: A fishing line is an electrical wire. When you catch a salmon, it's as if you're attached to the wilderness, to perfection.
It's because the salmon you catch is the best of the best. It's the little salmon that managed to escape from the minks, the mergansers and the natural predators in the river. It's the little salmon that made it out to sea, that escaped from the seals and all kinds of predators that wanted to eat it. It went to Greenland and came back. It was hunted again by fishers from Greenland, fishers from Newfoundland, other fishers out for herring or other species, and it came back. That means that when you catch a salmon, you're catching the best of the best, the one that managed to make it through.
You have your salmon, and it's incredible: Through the salmon, it flows into you; you have been through a fight, so the river heals you, calms you, and the salmon gives you incredible energy, energy that's like medicine. If we lose the salmon, then it's as if we're losing something incredibly magical that enables us to have beautiful lives.
I came here to tell you that, as Canadians, if we lose the salmon, we lose one of the most important things for our mental health and our joy of being alive on this earth.