END OF CHAPTER FOR LIBRARY.
RURAL NEWFOUNDLAND TOWN ‘BLINDSIDED’
The Fogo Island Public Library has more than 14,000 books. Children go there for homework help, fishermen to download work documents and just about everyone to use the Internet.
It hosts card nights, colouring sessions and Easter egg hunts. It is the only library on the island, an hour’s ferry ride from the rest of Newfoundland and Labrador. It is closing on Oct. 31. The library’s demise is a decision that came down to money, set in motion by a Liberal government elected last fall. Their first budget, unveiled in April, projected a record deficit of $2.2 billion. Soon, taxes will rise. Schools will axe teachers and increase class sizes. The public library system will be trimmed by more than half, as 54 of 95 locations shutter their doors in the next two years.
Although there are 2,620 public libraries in Canada, according to a 2014 Royal Society of Canada report, it is possible the condemned branches of Newfoundland are the most important. They are located, mainly, in rural communities, from 1,000-person Arnold’s Cove to Woody Point, deep in the expanse of a national park.
Books are often scarce in these areas — but their libraries, like Fogo’s, are not just repositories of printed words. They make the Internet accessible in places where broadband connectivity is not universal. They provide public space where movie theatres and sports arenas have never been built.
And they mean the world to people like Christine Dwyer.
Dwyer, 68, has been a member of Fogo’s library board for 39 years. Before retiring in 2008, she taught for three-plus decades at the island’s only school, Fogo Island Central Academy, where the library is housed. “The school is like family to us, and the library especially,” she told the National Post.
When Newfoundland’s government announced the library closures, it tried to soften the news through a compromise: 85 per cent of residents would still be within a 30-minute drive of a branch, in what Andrew Hunt, executive director of the Provincial Information and Library Resources Board, called a move to a regional “service-centre approach.”
Fogo’s 2,500 or so townspeople are part of the other 15 per cent. The only way to get to and from the mainland is an hour-long commute by ferry, by way of a wharf called “Farewell.”
“If ours closed down and I were to go to a library, I drive 30 minutes to get to the ferry, I wait for God knows how long, I have one hour on the ferry, and then I have a onehour drive to see which library I want to go to, whether it be Gander, Lewisporte or Twillingate,” Dwyer said.
“So people are just not going to do it. The residents of Fogo Island are just not going to read as much.”
Literacy will not be the only loss, Dwyer said.
Fogo’s library is the regional site for the Community Access Program, a federal initiative to guarantee affordable Internet access. A few years ago, the province closed Fogo’s Employment Assistance office, meaning fishery workers affected by seasonal layoffs must apply for employment insurance online. Those workers will have to turn somewhere else again.
“I believe the closures are going to be most heartily felt in the rural areas,” said Krista Godfrey, president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Library Association.
“Libraries are an outlet for those communities: for social support, for finding government information, for finding jobs, learning how to use a computer, learning how to read.”
“(Those) are often the times when public libraries are used the most, because people don’t necessarily have the income that they (usually) do, if they’re underemployed or unemployed,” said Paul Takala, the incoming chairman of the Canadian Urban Libraries Council. “Oftentimes, they’re trying to upgrade their skills, or spending time looking for different kinds of work.”
To help offset the closures, the province intends to expand two niche services — electronic books and books-by-mail orders, currently offered to library users who live 24 kilometres or more from the nearest branch. And even as locations close, their materials may not be lost forever.
Fogo was “blindsided” by the decision to shut their library, Dwyer said — partly because, on its own, it will barely save the province any money. Since the library is in a school, it does not pay rent, janitorial costs or electricity and hydro bills; its only significant expense is a salary for one librarian, at 23 hours a week.
Even after Oct. 31, the room will stay warm and lit. It will be up to the people of Fogo to consider what was lost.
“A lot of rural communities depend on their libraries,” Dwyer said. “Some of them will go to a library within driving distance. For Fogo Island, that’s not going to happen. Just not going to happen.”
THE RESIDENTS OF FOGO ISLAND ARE JUST NOT GOING TO READ AS MUCH.