Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to finish off the three remaining minutes of my speech regarding Bill C-465. The bill has the full support of everyone in all four parties in the House, so I do not imagine it will present a huge problem to get the bill passed through committee.
One of the aspects of the bill is that it would designate September 30, or perhaps the third Saturday in September, depending on how the committee develops it, as the national hunting, trapping and fishing heritage day. We have to recognize that the United States has had such a heritage day since 1972. With the increased border changes over the last couple of years, with the United States now requiring passports for their citizens to return to the United States and with the global recession still not being quite resolved, there is a lot of pressure on tourism right now in Canada.
As I had been indicated before, in Manitoba, in northwestern Ontario and right across the country the fishing camps, tourist camps and all sorts of other camps are hurting. Numerous camps that rely on American tourists and cross-border tourism are finding that their business is down. I was told that business may be down as much as 30%. Therefore, we need to come to grips with how we can recover from that and get the hunters and fishers back to Canada to keep our industry alive.
One of the ideas that I have pushed in the past, which I know other people support, is that we should work with the Americans to reduce the price of passports. We have had various meetings with United States congresspeople and at every meeting the issue of having a bigger update of people applying for passports has been raised. At our last meetings in February, one congressman indicated that to get passports for just himself and his family was quite an expensive enterprise. We should be working at that level with the United States to try to reduce the cost of the passports to encourage more people to get them so we can get more tourism from the United States.
I cannot believe that my three minutes could possibly be over. I had so much more to talk about. I had some information on the buffalo hunt, which members will know was pointed to as an example of bad hunting practices where 60 million buffalo were practically wiped out. However, it has all been brought back by conservation and farmers and ranchers working to--