Newfoundland’s resettled people seek apology and redress
State-sponsored apologies and the redress for historical injustices perpetrated against citizens are now commonplace.
A good state should, of course, acknowledge and accept responsibility for harms perpetrated in the past and offer its citizens compensation for its actions.
In Canada, governments have, famously and correctly, apologized for the destructive harm of residential schools, for state-sponsored, systematic oppression and rejection of LGBT Canadians within the civil service, and to a variety of others, including Chinese-, Japanese- and South Asiancanadians.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to apologize soon for Canada’s turning away the St. Louis, carrying 900 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939.
The City of Halifax also apologized for the resettlement of Africville, a small community of black residents outside Halifax, and Saskatchewan is working on an apology for the Sixties Scoop.
It is now time for the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Government of Canada to apologize for the resettlement program. It dramatically changed the lives of all involved, perhaps even sending many elderly citizens to an early grave. It was a traumatic experience, especially for young children.
In July 1969 we were part of the massive government-sponsored resettlement that saw nearly 30,000 citizens relocated from their homes in hundreds of communities between 1954 and 1975. The Canadian government financed most of the costs of moving people between 1965 and 1975.
Our family was moved from Pushthrough to Hermitage on Newfoundland’s southwest coast, but families throughout the province were relocated to new communities.
Although the move for our family was only 10 kilometres across Hermitage Bay, the two communities occupied different worlds. Pushthrough had few of the amenities that Hermitage enjoyed, including running water, flush toilets, electricity and, of course, a large school.
We were just like thousands of other resettled children: their new schools were unlike anything they had ever experienced.
Those resettled children often had a traumatic experience in their new schools and we, too, know stories of resettled children involved in fights on the playground and being victims of bullying and all sorts of taunts and derision.
The merits and rationale for resettlement have long been debated. Some have seen the government’s resettlement of thousands as the victimization of innocent citizens who never asked to be relocated. People were forced from their communities and the homes they owned into strange, sometimes unwelcoming, communities.
In 1971, The Evening Telegram compared resettlement to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, and famed columnist Ray Guy termed it “one of the greatest crimes committed against the Newfoundland people.”
Others have praised resettlement as ending the isolation that had been the curse of Newfoundland for generations, and improving, finally, the level of public services for thousands of people.
Even if resettlement was a public policy option that met a number of pressing needs, government officials and the politicians who supported resettlement ignored the social consequences of their actions.
Our first days of school in that September in 1969 were fraught with fear and trepidation. In Pushthrough we had no cars or school buses and we knew everyone. In Hermitage we had to ride a crowded school bus, and, like thousands of resettled children, we were thrust into crowded classrooms with kids who had known each other from birth.
Not surprisingly, many resettled children failed to make the grade and were forced to repeat a year. Others simply quit.
Resettled children were the outsiders, laughed at and ridiculed, often bullied by insensitive kids who did not realize they were being mean. Resettled children were physically and mentally victimized. They had to survive on our own. There were no support mechanisms.
Children are survivors, however, and they adjusted over time, helped perhaps when a new wave of resettled people arrived.
We did well largely because our mom, a single mother with six children, was stoic and determined that we take our schooling seriously, even if the state never cared much.
She received $2,428 — about $14,500 in today’s dollars — to re-establish her family and purchase or build a house in Hermitage. It was a mere pittance, an insult really, when the only home we could find cost $5,000, more than double what the government provided in assistance.
Of course, there were no savings in the family, and her eldest sons and daughter helped her pay for the house, an unfair burden to have placed on young people struggling to begin their own lives.
Those who built new homes rarely had enough money to complete them, and it was common for resettled people to live in unfinished houses for quite some time.
Older adults and seniors, like our grandmother, had few coping strategies, just misery and despair. Our grandmother was in her late 60s when resettled from Pushthrough. With $1,200 in resettlement allowances and grants, she could never hope to own her own home and recreate the space she had in Pushthrough.
She moved in with us, and ceased to enjoy the independent, sustainable living she had had for decades. It seems now that Harry Potter’s dementors took over her life.
Her smiles were few and she certainly wasn’t happy after being resettled. Her community and life were torn asunder and destroyed, her lovely garden lost forever, and she died a few years after moving.
We still wonder if she died of a broken heart and a crushed spirit. In her mind, the evil, callous government men had destroyed her community and ruined her life by forcing her out of Pushthrough to resettle in Hermitage.
Like many others in Canada — those citizens imprisoned during the First and Second World Wars, those denied entry into Canada because of their ethnicity and race, those who suffered the indignity and cost of a head tax, children victimized and abused at residential schools, gays and lesbians forced from the civil service, and many others — resettled peoples are victims, too, and deserve redress.
As a start, they deserve from the Government of Canada an apology from Prime Minister Justine Trudeau, whose father, Pierre, incidentally, was party to the federal-provincial resettlement agreement, and from Premier Dwight Ball for the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador.
The redress must come with compensation for the trauma and disruption perpetrated against them and the harm suffered at the hands of their governments.
If the governments of Canada and Newfoundland and Labrador fail to redress the grievances of the victims and survivors of resettlement, then a class-action lawsuit will be considered.
It was their governments that managed the resettlement program and oversaw the relocation of thousands of people in Newfoundland and Labrador.
It was their governments, too, that developed and introduced the state policies that led to their relocation. A caring and compassionate government acknowledges the harm it has caused.
Hayward Blake and Raymond Blake lived in Pushthrough until they moved in 1969 to Hermitage with their mother, Minnie, three other brothers and one sister, and a cat. Hayward is a well-known educator, presently at Memorial University. Raymond is professor of history and department head at the University of Regina and the author of numerous books.