Stay or go? Newfoundland town divided over prospect of resettlement

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Doug Skinner knows where he will go when it’s all over. Up to the cemetery on the hill where his late wife waits for him. His name is already on the tombstone.

For others in this Newfoundland outport, the decision isn’t as easy. For centuries, people have lived in Gaultois, a crack in the rock that surrounds the province’s south coast, and have built a life around the bounty of the sea. But it’s been years since the last boat unloaded its catch at the old fish plant. The school that used to have hundreds of children has just four students now. In a village where everyone seems to be in their 70s, the nurse visits by boat only once a month.

Gaultois, whose population has dwindled from more than 700 in the early 1990s to just over 70, has long been a holdout in Newfoundland and Labrador’s efforts to phase out its most remote communities. Many of the families here trace their roots to other abandoned communities uprooted in previous decades.

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Little Bay Islands

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While Newfoundland’s population ticked upwards last year for the first time since 2016, the painful legacy of resettlement, started under premier Joey Smallwood, still continues in its most isolated villages. Newfoundland resettled nearly 30,000 people, from nearly 300 communities between 1954 and 1975, as part of its controversial program to centralize its population and reduce the costs of government services.

In recent decades, resettlement has been a slower, voluntary process, enacted once 75 per cent of residents request it. Four communities have relocated in the past 10 years – Round Harbour, William’s Harbour, Snook’s Arm and Little Bay Islands.

Gaultois will soon take that fateful vote, after turning down resettlement multiple times in its history. The debate, whether to take the government money – up to $270,000 per household – and leave, or whether to try to hold on for a few more years, is splitting the community.

For Mr. Skinner, who lost his wife to cancer in 2019, saying goodbye to his home and starting over somewhere else isn’t an option.

“I’m not leaving,” he said, matter-of-factly. “My name’s on that headstone. That’s the bottom line.”

Some are hesitant to talk about the decision facing Gaultois. But those in the “leave” camp point to frequent ferry disruptions, a lack of economic opportunities, and the challenge of medical appointments that require crossing the bay by boat – there’s no road into Gaultois – then a long drive north through the woods. It’s a two-hour trip to Grand Falls-Windsor, the nearest emergency room.

“It’s getting bad, b’y,” said Craig Ingram, 48, painting a wooden stairway with a bright new coat of red and white paint. “And it’s not going to get better.”

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Many of the homes here are already abandoned. The sun-bleached fish stages, a reminder of when this was a busy fishing village, sit empty. The playground where they used to dry codfish bound for the West Indies is silent, except for the squawks of a few stray cats.

“I don’t want to see it go, but it’s time,” said Blake Hunt, 19, one of the few young people left in town.

Many seem pained by the idea of leaving, however. It’s peaceful and quiet here, they say, and protected from the sea by steep green mountains. When post-tropical storm Fiona devastated coastal communities further west in Newfoundland, Gaultois was shielded by the harbour’s big, natural walls and suffered no damage.

There’s hardly any flat ground anywhere in town, so the homes are crowded into hillsides around winding roads mostly travelled by four-wheelers whose drivers often stop to chat with passersby. If you need help with anything at all, it’s just a matter of asking a neighbour, people like to say.

“It’s like heaven on earth,” said Ron Simms, 76, who owns the community’s tiny grocery store.

It’s also changed a lot, he acknowledged. Mr. Simms runs the Junior Canadian Rangers program, which teaches youth how to survive in the wilderness. This year, there’s only one boy enrolled.

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There’s no need for police, because there’s no crime, residents say. There’s no traffic, because there’s only two vehicles in the whole village – a “town car” for hauling garbage and a firetruck.

“I’ve never needed a car,” said Earl Kendell, the 84-year-old lay minister at St. Luke’s Anglican Church, built in 1927.

The old wooden pews at St. Luke’s seldom creak under the weight of parishioners anymore. The building used to be the backbone of the community, Mr. Kendell said.

Today, you have to go back years in the church’s registry to find record of a wedding or a baptism. Funerals are much more common, he said.

The organist moved away a few years ago, so they used canned music for Sunday services, attended by a handful of seniors.

“There’s nobody having children here,” said Mr. Kendell, who’s never had a driver’s licence. “But I don’t want to think about leaving. I can’t just go somewhere else and start all over again.”

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The province says no one can be forced to leave. But if the community votes in favour of relocation, all municipal and provincial services would be withdrawn – including electricity, ferries, school, road maintenance and water and sewer treatment. The holdouts know life after that would be difficult.

In Gaultois, the vote process itself is contentious. The provincial government recently lowered the threshold from 90 to 75 per cent, fuelling suspicion the bureaucrats in the capital want to push people out.

“This change is intended to provide opportunity to communities which have a significant portion of [their] population that have expressed a desire to relocate, but have been unable to meet the 90 per cent threshold,” Jacquelyn Howard, spokesperson of the Department of Municipal and Provincial Affairs, said in an e-mail.

The municipality was caught off-guard that someone had applied to begin that process without giving the community notice. And there’s debate over who should have a vote – many families maintain seasonal properties, which makes them ineligible for compensation.

The province says it’s received 80 affidavits from people who want to vote, more than the number of current Gaultois residents, and is validating those claims to residency. It recently updated its policy to allow some people who have left for medical reasons, such as those in nursing homes, to get a vote, too.

“Most people who wanted to go have already left,” said Daphne Hunt, the local postmaster. “To everyone else, I say, that money isn’t going to go as far as you think.”

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Her husband, Todd Hunt, works in the salmon farms that dot the bays along the south coast. It’s one of the few steady jobs left here since the fish plant closed for good in 2009. At its peak, prior to the cod moratorium, the plant employed over 400 workers. Gaultois was booming then – with its own bank, sawmill, and so many kids there wasn’t space for all of them in the pond hockey league. At lunch break, the workers would leave the fish plant and tread home along the harbour’s wooden boardwalk in a long procession.

He’s worried some people are only thinking about the money, and will regret deciding to leave, once it’s too late.

“I don’t think people realize once you leave, there’s no looking back. It’s gone. That’s it,” he said.

St. John’s feels a long way from here. St. Pierre and Miquelon, the French islands, are much closer, just a few hours away by boat – so close that people still remember when bootleggers would return with boats loaded with cans of rum that they’d mix with hot water and sugar, while keeping an eye out for the Mounties. Residents say the politicians in the provincial capital don’t understand what’s being lost as more outports are abandoned in rural Newfoundland.

“The government is bullying small towns,” said Gord Hunt, the town’s mayor, who worries he may be its last. “They want to resettle all these communities. But the outports made life in Newfoundland. They made this province. Not St. John’s.”

At 75, he doesn’t want to go. But the mayor says he wants to do what’s right for his family, and his grandkids. If Gaultois is abandoned, he knows what the next step will be for him. “It’s going to be in a senior’s complex somewhere,” he said, squinting toward the sea.

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Others say the province has slowly whittled away services, speeding up the decline. And it’s not done enough to protect these living examples of Newfoundland heritage.

“The government should be more creative to preserve and protect jewels like this, instead of cutting one service after another like has happened in Gaultois with health care and ferry service,” said Jane Pitfield, a former Toronto city councillor who owns the Gaultois Inn and now resides in Quebec. “This has worn people down.”

Derek Hunt, a retired teacher who can see whales in the bay from his bedroom window, says he’s torn. His children have left for school and careers elsewhere, and there’s nothing for them here. It’s been hard watching his community slowly disappear, losing school sports as enrolment dropped and saying goodbye to more friends.

But he says he’s also not ready to leave yet. This is his home.

“No one wants to see their town die,” he said. “But I think the writing might be on the wall.”

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Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article misidentified former Toronto city councillor Jan Pitfield. This version has been corrected.