Government encourages residents to abandon their small communities

well don't let the photographs fool you this is a community with no doctor no store barely any people but what the pictures show that even a dying town can be a very hard place to leave the map of Canada is dotted with small isolated communities many on the brink of extinction and tonight we'll tell you about one of them and why we're headed to little bay islands off Newfoundland it's one of dozens about ports where the province wants to move people out and save on services but as Chris O'Neil Yates discovered some residents are down on packing up Mike Parsons is living his dream how did you get down without falling down Barrie didn't run this morning he and his wife Georgina have made their own private skating loop on the harbour they moved back to retire early in Little Bay Islands at the same time as nearly everyone else is getting ready to leave in the winter there are only 46 people who live here myself and Georgina we wanted to become part of the community while it still existed as a community we absolutely love it we're outdoors people we ski we skate with snowmobile we're boating people so all the things that we love to do are here in Airport Newfoundland money can't buy the happiness that this place brings us Little Bay Islands is breathtakingly beautiful but the province believes it can save money by resettling towns like this the new resettlement policy has the government offering its residents up to two hundred and seventy thousand dollars to move to bigger communities it will save millions of dollars the decision to stay or go has created a rift among a handful of residents I totally get why people want to leave I totally get why there's some people that might want to stay I think it's a bad program primarily because it targets rural Newfoundland to depopulate it it's the isolated ones the small ones the ones that to a large degree by the way are a major attraction to tourists coming to this province Peter Fenwick is an innkeeper he's also the mayor of Cape st. George which is about 370 kilometers away from Little Bay Islands he's a vocal critic of resettlement so what happens is people stay even if they don't want to stay and the whole program works in entirely the opposite direction of what some foolish bureaucrat has designed it to do in some cases Fenwick says people are holding off moving until they can get the government payouts that only happens when ninety percent of residents are on board it may take a decade for some communities but under the program they'll get paid much more to leave than their properties are worth I would hope that the government would say our deficit is now two billion dollars and we can't afford to do this anymore little bay islands there the government built a ferry that was too big and costly to start with it was built for more than 27 million dollars in 2011 and it's more than sixteen thousand five hundred dollars to operate per person per year some bureaucrat or some politician in the past has decided that we're going to have this big fancy boat and then we're going to make sure that there's a cook on it who makes a hundred thousand dollars a year and then virtually the entire crew dies so it's not the blame of the people in the small communities it's it's the government's poor policies that have made it so expensive today my videographer and I were the only ones taking the boat on our return trip about five hundred kilometers away this community took matters into its own hands Centreville on its own was not a viable community but it amalgamated with two others in 1992 now a combined 1,100 people live here the noble family has been manufacturing wood products for 40 years Shane Nobles relatives already resettled once from a nearby island in the 1950s he moved to Ontario for a while but came back to run the family business 15 years ago after I moved back I brought four families back home I think I've got an opportunity you can you come back every one of them did the community itself could easily disappear but there's five or six manufacturers here there's different people here with the mentality that we want to be here so we create our own opportunities one of the new opportunities he's pursuing is a line of affordable modular furniture people just don't understand how much opportunity there is an out port and that's where Alexa Perry comes in as a child she moved out of Newfoundland when her parents lost their jobs in the cod collapse if I told anybody that I was moving to Newfoundland to do marketing they'd think I was insane and turns out there's plenty of opportunity here to do marketing when I come back here to visit and see that that's what's happening that people are leaving the communities and there's that threat of that history dying well I think that's the exact reason that I feel compelled to come back because those roots are still important to me so Noble believes there are other reasons that make a living here attractive we're talking some large corporations who have executives that live in rural New Flint simply because we have internet it's an hour's drive to the airport and st. and Gander so it's high-paying jobs that live here I take tons and tons of pictures every day in the hundreds of pictures what I'm trying to do with my pictures is kind of create some of that emotional connection to little Bay Islands you know little balance cousin it doesn't get lost the persons have a plan for after the provincial government cuts off all services so when the ferry stops we have our own 42 foot long liner so we can travel pretty much year-round we have three deep freezes in the basement and one is full of fish moving into a community that is emptying out is not for everyone and Parsons believes there's more to life here these islands and these communities have so much to offer that for people that want to get away from a busy lifestyle from living in cities or live in parts of the world where they want to get back to the land and they want to experience a slower pace of life a life where he and his wife will have the entire island to themselves Chris O'Neill Yeats CBC News little Bay Islands Newfoundland

Channel: CBC News: The National

Views: 620,177

Keywords: Newfoundland, Labrador, rural communities, tiny communities, provincial government, abandon, vacate, cost savings, resettlement, Little Bay Island, The National, CBC, Chris O'Neill- Yates

Id: KgHR1gJiqtg

Length: 7min 4sec (424 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 17 2018