NWOTA members fighting for stronger voice

Members of the Northwestern Ontario Tourism Association want a stronger voice, a voice that needs to be formed by any one who appreciates the resource of northern Ontario.
At Friday’s annual spring meeting in Nestor Falls members agreed that outdoor recreation is being eroded in this part of the province–a trend that will continue without any action.
“We have to have a voice, a strong voice. Right now we are all split,” noted newly-elected president NWOTA Tom Pearson.
“The biggest thing that has to happen it we all want to fish and we all want to hunt but the more we fight each other the more others will pick at us,” he said. “We have to get together or it will all disappear.”
“Look at how fast the bear hunt disappeared, a stroke of a pen and it was gone,” he added. “We’re going to wake up some time and it will have disappeared.”
An example, and also a hot topic at NWOTA, is the Trout Road access issue. After an MNR consultation process the road will be opened to public access for two weeks during the hunting season.
“It angers me to think that people think that they have to have it all. It’s going to be a major deal, everybody has to realize what’s happening,” said Pearson who explained the camps, only accessible by plane in the Trout Lake system are the only ones left here.
“I don’t want to have to go to northern Manitoba to go on a fly-in like when I was a kid,” he said. “Manitoba protects those areas.”
Another big concern among NWOTA members was the possibility of long border line-ups persuading hunters not to cross into Canada.
The recently introduced legislation requiring visiting hunters to fill out registration forms before entering Canada is expected by many NWOTA members to make for long, tedious line-ups.
“We’re talking like 2,500 a month and the thing is most of those are going to come on weekends,” remarked Pearson.
“They say they can do it but we’re not sure, we hope they can,” he added.
The lengthy forms required to be filled out by anyone carrying a firearm across the border are expected to take anywhere up to 22 minutes a person, a processing delay that worries NWOTA members.