Everybody is earning 2-3 hundred dollars after a day’s hard work. It feels good for teenagers, grandparents, senior citizens. They said how it feels good to be able to pay for more than their pension allows, to buy something a bit better for their grandchildren. The passion, the intensity and the sheer belief in the potential of the freshwater fish industry to create wealth and jobs for citizens of his Metis Nation is almost overwhelming as Frank Kenyon tells the story of how the people of St. Laurent and Lundar rallied together this past summer.
All of the people who worked on this project were paid cash money and they went home happy and Frank Kenyon started to tell the story far and wide to anybody who would listen. But the EDL Gaudry had obtained and which is absolutely necessary for this kind of success story to take place, is rarely given out by the FFMC.
Frank Kenyon wants to tell his story over and over again. More accurately, he wants to change the situation so that he can create bigger and better tales with each telling. The meeting is not to attack the FFMC; its management or staff. The FFMC is only following the rules the way things are right now. The meeting is to convince Members of Parliament, Members of the Legislative Assembly, provincial cabinet ministers, federal and provincial bureaucrats, the Presidents of Metis Nation regions and locals, Chiefs, Mayors, Reeves all who attend the meeting (and every one has been invited) to work together to change the existing system and make it work like it used to.
Kenyon noted that the FFMC was a good idea when it was first developed. Fishers were being taken advantage of by unscrupulous fish buyers who played one fisher off against the other, or who simply manipulated and lied when it came to pricing and profits and the return which was provided to the people who provided the fish in the first place.
