”Tuesday, March 5, 1968

beets. And in talking to the members of the Parliament when I was there on that short visit they were of the opinion that something could be worked out along these lines. And we have a Minister of Agriculture here who is going to do these things for us, because you heard him on the television the other night, on that terrific performance, how he laid out the problems of the potato industry on this Island, and in a day or two he will be able to give you some of the answers 0! what they propose to do to remendy it.

I think we should look to the East, Mr. Speaker, and forget about looking to the South. Our potato market is influenced, the price is influenced according to the height of the potatoes in the American bin, and that should not be. It is too unstable a sort of thing if they are going to depend in this little Province down here on the number of potatoes which are in the bins in the State of Maine. I think we have to look to the country that is not producing these kind of things. We have it in England, we have it in the British Isles. We used to think that England was too far away to be shipping this kind of produce, but here on one hand it is not any further to England than if you shipped them to Winnipeg. I think that we must look in these directions. We must look to the great consumer markets not only of London of course, but of all of the British Isles. There is no reason why they should ship potatoes for nine cents to London per pound from the Island of Jersey, while they ship them in United States for sixty-five cents for fifty pounds. I think it was only Thursday of last week they were loading potatoes in Ellsworth, Maine. Sixty-five cents for fifty pounds of potatos, and we consider that this is a provincial problem here in the little Province of Prince Edward Island. This isn’t something that grew up over night. But if you will look at the graph, the potato graph in this country for the past fifteen or twenty years you will find many peaks but you will also find many valleys in it. I think that we have to find markets that are going to give us more stability than this. It is a great oppor- tunity at the present time, because England is trying to get into the European Economic Community and can’t get in. They are looking to buy these products from elsewhere, and we have them so why not negotiate with them and sell them?

Furthermore, Mr. Speaker, I think another outlet for our markets which must be explored, and the Minister has it in his planning for this year, is the Northern, our Northern markets. We have a great expansion and a great opening up of the country of Labrador. Let us explore that further too, we are inclined to cry havoc when potatoes are a poor price but when the potatoes are a good price we forget it. But I think now is the time for us to explore all of these avenues in order that we will at least get a living wage for our farmers.

They need more than this in England as well, because when I was in Lon— don I got a small side dish of crab meat. I would suggest it would be three ounces, Mr. Speaker, and at a cost of $1.68. We catch crabs out off here and we processed them last year. The research was carried on first in the Eastern Fisheries and then were able to process many thousands of pounds of crab meat last year and a much better product than I discovered they had in England, which came all the way from Japan.

We have a tremendous potential for the crab meat of our Province and there seems to be unlimited resources. And this enterprising outfit in Souris, this East- ern Fisheries, have already found new markets for the crab meat, so it looks in- deed encouraging for my colleague, Dauntless Dan and myself, for the coming years as far as this industry is concerned.

We have something else too down in the First District of Kings, which has been explored during the past year more fully than ever before, and that is the Irish Moss industry. Abegweit Industries Limited put a drying plant there and 1 just want to quote to this House some of the figures relating to the Moss In- dustry in our Kings County, because it seems to me that many are labouring under much misapprehension regarding this moss industry. Let me give you the figures for Kings County and show you how it has come up during the past five years and the great potential which we have there for the future.

The Kings County landings in 1962 were 983,000 lbs. —— under a million pounds.

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