Mike Parsons always dreamed of retiring to his hometown of Little Bay Islands. But when he and his wife moved back to the four-square-mile outpost off Newfoundland’s northeastern coast in 2017, he never imagined they’d be its last inhabitants. Parsons, 53, remembers Little Bay Islands as a thriving village of hundreds at the center of the province’s booming cod fishing industry, a postcard of bucolic bliss with its green forested hills, brightly painted saltbox homes, bustling shops and lively dockyards huddled around a small blue harbor. The strains on Little Bay Islands — emigration, resource collapse, aging populations — are familiar to small towns around the world. Local leaders have tried to revive dying villages with offers of homes or promises to pay would-be residents to move in. Newfoundland and Labrador takes a different approach: It pays you to leave. Faced with mounting debt and still struggling to recover from a fishery collapse and an oil-price slump, the government pays households in declining, expensive-to-serve communities ,000 to ,000 to move — and then cuts off services to the community. There are a few conditions: The request must come from the community, not the province; at least 90 percent of residents must vote to leave; and a cost-benefit analysis must show a likelihood of net savings. He ticks off a series of “lasts” in recent weeks: the last church service, the last mail delivery, the last night at the “Poachers Lounge,” an unofficial hangout where villagers played darts and sang songs. “It’s absolutely heartbreaking to see these people trying to pack up a lifetime of stuff and move elsewhere,” Parsons said. “Most of these people have only ever lived on Little Bay Islands.” Resettlement has a long and controversial history in Newfoundland and Labrador. When the former British dominion joined Canada in 1949, Premier Joey Smallwood struggled to provide services to the 1,200 outposts that dotted the coast. In 1954, he started the first of several centralization programs that gave cash to households from villages with “no great future” to move to government-selected “growth centers.” From 1954 to 1975, roughly 28,000 people from nearly 300 remote outposts were uprooted and resettled, many of them dragging or floating their houses to their new communities. Related: Pictures of the year: Natural disasters (Reuters) Jeffrey Webb, a professor of history at Memorial University in Newfoundland, said people “weren’t explicitly threatened,” but there was “gossip and rumor and fear” that if they didn’t take the money, services would be cut anyway, and they’d still be forced to move, without compensation. In a letter to a concerned resident in 1958, Smallwood said he didn’t “intend to spend public money to help people jump from the frying pan into the fire.” But to this day, resettlement is highly charged, and the programs have been memorialized by writers, artists and in protest songs. (The locals call seasonal residents “stouts,” after a bloodsucking deer fly that’s hard to shoo away.) As a little girl, she would eat dinner with the European ship captains who sailed their trading vessels to the island in search of salted fish. As an adult, she learned the sand she had played in as a child had been brought as ballast for ships from as far away as Europe and Africa. Bragg acknowledged the process can be “a little contentious.” It’s impossible, he said, “to please 100 percent of the people.” Does he think Newfoundland’s resettlement program is a success? “I’m just the person who is writing the checks.” Bob Pittman was the last resident to leave Great Harbour Deep. “I still miss my home.” Parsons was also denied a vote — he hadn’t lived on the island for a full year when the village requested relocation in 2017. Then Mike and Georgina will throw the lines for the MV Hazel McIsaac ferry as it makes its final trip.
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