Forced resettlement of rural communities was wrong
The movement of people is normal and natural since our earliest ancestors moved out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago to eventually populate the planet.
More recently, in the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s, our Merasheen and Placentia Bay ancestors arrived — mainly from France, Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales.
They were fleeing hard times, seeking better opportunities out west across the wide Atlantic. Their descendants from N.L. continue to move west today to seek their fortunes.
The French were expelled from Placentia Bay after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. This was the first forced expulsion from Placentia Bay, though likely there was an earlier relocation as Aboriginals were displaced when Europeans arrived to fish and settle.
In the 1920s, our relatives left Merasheen and other communities in Placentia Bay for Canada and the eastern seaboard of the United States. The people of Little Placentia (Argentia) moved rather quickly, taking their dead with them, when the Americans arrived to build a military base.
RESETTLEMENT
In the 1950s, Merasheen joyfully welcomed families from other communities in Placentia Bay while saying goodbye to families who moved to Placentia for better prospects.
In 1954, a governmentassisted program managed by the provincial department of welfare “encouraged” moving homes and belongings to a larger community. It paid for the relocation of houses and belongings.
Cash payments of $150 per family eventually increased to $600. This centralization program resettled over 100 communities and 7,500 people. This earlier voluntary program had negative issues (including rumours and fearmongering) that should have provided some warning and learning regarding the federal-provincial Fisheries Household Resettlement Program (FHRP) implemented between 1964 and 1969.
LINGERING IRE
So the movement of individuals and families, even communities, seems normal and natural. Some move willingly. Some are forced by war, famine and disaster. Some feel coerced.
Then why all the lingering polarization, divisiveness, disagreement, regret and often rage about resettlement in N.L.?
It’s not about resettlement in general. It’s concerning the particular FHRP, and rightly so, that ire prevails more than 50 years later. People spit and utter strong expletives when the FHRP issue is mentioned. It remains a unique and controversial issue in our history.
The FHRP created all the problems and still leaves a lot of rancor. This program ended with the defeat of premier Joey Smallwood and the election of Frank Moores in 1971-72.
CHANGES IN RELOCATION
Resettlement of communities is still happening in N.L. However, this new community relocation policy states the government cannot encourage or initiate any action to promote resettlement.
This program now requires a community vote of 75 per cent (reduced from 90 per cent). Present compensation is much higher, not a pittance. The new process has to be community-initiated, directed and controlled. The heavy hand of government is not as obvious.
There was way bigger financial support for communities such as Great Harbour Deep in 2002, Grand Bret in 2010, Williams Harbour in 2017 and Little Bay Islands in 2021.
My issue is not with resettlement, it’s with the planning and process, and remuneration, of the specific program FHRP, which decimated Placentia Bay. Unlike other past and present resettlement programs, government and the church were actively involved in the Fisheries Household Resettlement Program of 1964-1969. Pushing, shoving, forcing and coercing was rampant.
GENESIS AND CONTEXT
N.L. was then under the dominance of a megalomaniac premier who was determined that N.L. would have to “industrialize or perish.”
His government spearheaded multiple foolhardy development schemes toward this end: a linerboard mill, a rubber boot factory, a chocolate factory, a hockey stick factory, etc. Most of these ideas were poorly researched, badly planned and ineptly managed. Many of these schemes failed.
Smallwood surrounded himself with a cadre of barnacled politicians together with young, handpicked, smooth-faced (scarcely shaving yet) neophytes, all of whom would do anything to curry the premier’s favour or to avoid his wrath. The top bureaucracy owed their civil service jobs to Smallwood, who had handpicked them from all corners of the Earth, and they directed a cowered staff beneath them.
The premier governed like an emperor. There was little or no political opposition at this time. There were no counterweights or challenges to his frenzied drive to industrialize N.L. It was a time when politicians and bureaucrats, if asked to jump by the premier, answered firstly with, “How high, Mr. Premier?”
CHANGING FISHERY PLAN
The FHRP was intended to be an important element in Smallwood’s desire to expediently move the fishery from a family saltfish operation in small communities to a freshfrozen industrialized factory model with large processing plants and fish-hunting steel dragger fleets in a few communities, labelled growth centres.
Now ask yourself: where was the skilled labour to staff these steel draggers and the giant factories that would operate day and night? In the outports, of course.
Partly, FHRP was a program to provide a skilled labour force to an industrialized fishery located in a number of key communities along a large coastline. Ironically, this new model that operated for 20 years or so eventually helped decimate the northern cod stock and led to the cod moratorium and the closure of the fishery in 1992, a disaster from which the cod and communities have not yet recovered in more than 30 years. How’s that for planning and stewardship?
The FHRP was a large-scale social-engineering scheme that was perfectly in tune with the Smallwoodian political, economical, social and development model that held sway for the first 20 years after Confederation with Canada.
DISRESPECTFUL OF GOOD PROCESS
The Fisheries Household Resettlement Program was designed by outsiders for people, without their involvement.
Rural people were regarded as patients rather than partners in the program.
The manipulators of FHRP intentionally decided to not consult with real experts. Consider the derogatory “R” words attached to reports and programs to assist rural communities: rural reconstruction, rural rehabilitation, rural resettlement, rural renewal, rural revitalization and rural relocation.
These words indicate a negative mindset that rural people and communities need to be fixed. There should have been a well-designed consultation process with people in both the communities they were leaving and certainly, too, with people in the communities that would receive them.
The FHRP was presented to people as a fait accompli, with people forced to hurry through a few bureaucratic hoops and be gone quickly. It’s not good enough to just say it could have been carried out better, that the mistakes were mistakes of the heart.
It was intentionally topdown and heavy-handed. It was a full-court press by the government and its supporting agencies. It was patronizing, paternalistic, coercive and high-pressured in how it was carried out.
DISRESPECTFUL OF RURAL LIFE
Consider the bureaucratic language used to frame and justify programs like the FHRP. I have intentionally not identified the source of the following quotes because I believe that neither the authors nor their descendants will want to be reminded of this ignominy.
• “It is recognized by the Government of Canada and the province that it is desirable that considerable numbers of households in the province should be enabled to move from small settlements where the environment is unsatisfactory and to resettle to places which will be more to their advantage.”
• “Resettlement aims to move people from the fringes of civilization into a more urban setting where a more orderly arrangement of housing equipped with modern amenities would ease integration of a backward society into a North American consumer society. Through a program of modernization, primitive, illiterate, superstitious populations could be transformed into rational beings.”
• “Political leaders and expert bureaucrats set out to rehabilitate rural Newfoundland by moving them into a more industrialized urban environment where they would develop appropriate habits of mind that would enable them to become productive citizens. Left in their own communities, the rural population would never arrive above an impoverished existence.”
LITTLE UNDERSTANDING
Such language shows a great lack of understanding and respect for rural communities and way of life.
At worst, the language is demeaning, denigrating, insulting, narrow-minded and bigoted, as it’s used to rationalize and justify their positions and endeavours.
At best, such language is from misguided do-gooders who think they know what’s best for those stunned lazy louts in the outports.
If this language represents the knowledge and thinking of politicians, bureaucrats, academics and other apologists and justifiers of the FHRP, it’s no wonder they approached their jobs of planning, executing and justifying the FHRP as if they were herding cattle.
CATTLE PROGRAM
Some of us can still remember the great cattle resettlement program of 1964 when 1,000 head of Saskatchewan Herford beef cattle were herded down the Burin Peninsula highway from Goobies. This was another of Smallwood’s mad schemes.
At Goobies, Smallwood, with a 10-gallon white hat on his head, while mounted on a horse, posed for a photo at the head of the herders. It was another scheme that went terribly wrong.
The resettled cattle did not survive the climatic conditions of their new homeland. Smallwood may have wondered how he could clear the people from Placentia Bay as quickly as he moved the cattle down its western shore.
This scheme provides a good metaphor for what happened to more than 30 communities and 4,238 people in Placentia Bay under the FHRP. Whether or not people want to admit it, the process was similar to that cattle drive.
NO FOLLOWUP
People moved into new communities, grieving for what was lost, and felt estranged and astray for a long time.
Neither they nor their host communities were prepared for each other. Housing was an issue and often people were segregated on the fringes of the community, physically, mentally and emotionally. PTSD was never discussed or even understood then. Some never got over their ordeal.
It caused great emotional pain and bitterness. The trauma never healed for displaced people. They were left on their own.
Many, particularly the elderly, were traumatized in a strange place without their usual supports of family, friends and familiar surroundings.
My parents wept with loss. Later, I watched my venerable seagoing grandfather in the new place, spending his afternoons watching soap operas. It sears me, still.
The toll of resettlement is best captured in the powerful lyrics of the song “Outport People” by Sim Savoury and Bud Davidge:
“Don’t take a man from the life that he knows and tear up his roots and expect him to grow. ‘Cause if he’s unwillingly forced to decide, he’ll move without leaving and never arrive.”
MISERLY PROGRAM
Compared to the funding received by resettling households under more recent government-sponsored programs, funding under the Fisheries
Household Resettlement Program was insultingly small.
Many people who were reluctantly forced to capitulate under the FHRP were impoverished. However, people and communities who agreed to relocate in the last eight to 10 years have been more justly reimbursed.
Reimbursement under the FHRP was meagre by any standard. Under the FHRP social-engineering scheme, hard-working people yielded their birthright for a pittance.
HUMAN ELEMENT
In my research and readings, I’ve noticed that many post-resettlement evaluations and reports on resettlement either ignore or tend to disparage and belittle the input from the social sciences, particularly sociology and anthropology. Many of these questioned and challenged aspects of the FHRP tidal wave that swept through Placenta Bay.
Many academics, historians, economists, scientists, engineers, planners, consultants and evaluators, while labouriously defending the FHRP, too readily dismissed studies that addressed the human aspect.
Of equally great consequence, and sadly, too, many scoff at the input of playwrights, novelists, poets, singers and artists who stood with people on this issue. As Placentia Bay-born Pat Byrne eloquently sings:
“Those men who quote figures and count the cause lost
They see only the high seas and the lives it has cost
They don’t see the life as we know it to be
Like the seagulls who follow on freedom
“So they cheat us and they rob us and continue to say
That our only salvation is leaving the bay
But I’ll soon be ninety and there’s one thing I know
That the seagulls still follow on freedom.”
‘SALT OF THE EARTH’
There are varying perspectives on the issue of resettlement and specifically on the Fisheries Household Resettlement Program. There are a hundred vantage points from which to view the issue. All are part of the truth and essential for an honest discussion.
I know people from Merasheen and Placentia Bay were good, honourable and generous of spirit.
Their concerns were the same: news from the outside, the well-being of their families, relatives, neighbours and friends, the whims of the weather, the ways of the fish and the tides, the health of their animals, procreation and the continuance of family lines, the respectable maintenance of feuds and friendships and the worship of their God.
They were and are “the salt of the earth” people.
We were not the first nor will we be the last to be disrupted by a Placentia Bay relocation. Soon climate change and its impacts will create great movements of the planet’s people. In time, some of these people will eventually find security and a livelihood on the shores of Merasheen and Placentia Bay.
In a few hundred years, enterprising people speaking a different language and sharing a different culture will harvest the land and sea, celebrating their lives and luck. Likely some of our descendants will be there to welcome them.
In a thousand years, they, too, will perhaps move on under some program promoted by an energetic premier to settle another planet.
Our time in Placentia Bay is just a blink.