Looking for a future from an ocean away
Isolated St-Pierre-Miquelon struggles in its relationship with a distant republic
ST-PIERRE, ST-PIERRE-MIQUELON— Christine Hamel remembers when the island of St-Pierre, a foggy French outpost a dozen miles off the coast of Newfoundland, once thronged with boisterous fishermen from Europe, Russia and Canada. The bars were full, ships in the harbour shimmered with a scaly bounty and life was a contented pastiche of French habits, from fresh morning croissants to nightly digestifs.
The fishing industry is long gone from this speck of French territory in North America, home to 6,000 French citizens. Overfishing and geographic disputes with Canada have left these tiny islands clinging like barnacles to France’s vast bureaucratic hull to survive.
So when the French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen alighted on St-Pierre last year and promised to revive its fishing industry and strengthen economic ties to France, Hamel, 57, a retired police officer, decided to vote for the far-right firebrand.
“France has ignored St-Pierre for too long,” she said on a chilly evening in late April, echoing the accusation Le Pen levelled during her visit here last March, an extremely rare stop for a French politician. “Why not try Le Pen? Macron won’t do anything for us. He’s just twisting and turning like a flag in the wind,” she added, referring to Emmanuel Macron, the centrist candidate.
Macron, the favourite, and Le Pen will face each other in a runoff election Sunday.
For the people of St-Pierre and its sister island of Miquelon, mostly descendants of fishermen from Normandy and Brittany who came in the 19th century for the abundant cod, the electoral battle in France is a pressing reminder of their relationship with the distant republic.
More than 6,400 kilometres from France and its struggles with terrorism and cultural identity, the islands are a self-governing “overseas collectivity” bound by the French Constitution. The people vote in French elections, are represented in the French Parliament, use euros and rely on millions of euros in subsidies from France and the European Union, even as most goods are imported from Canada. About 40 per cent of residents are on the public payroll.
“We’re French but far away, and we have our own ideas,” Jean-Pierre Jezequel, 63, a retired technician, said as he sipped an aperitif at Le Baratin, a bar not far from Général de Gaulle square.
Over the din of a televised soccer game, Jezequel said that the European Union, which a few years ago gave the archipelago ¤26 million ($39 million Canadian) spent on new ferry boats to Newfoundland and other infrastructure, has a big impact on their daily lives.
Jezequel voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left candidate who won the first electoral round in the islands, but said he planned to vote for Macron — who favours keeping France in the European Union — in the second. “Le Pen wants out of Europe and that can be dangerous for us.”
He has little hope the next government will be able to steady StPierre’s listing fortunes. Efforts to boost tourism from Canada have been thwarted by a stronger euro and exorbitant travel costs that often make flights to Quebec and beyond more expensive than those from Montreal to Paris.
Yet Jezequel is proud of the French culture etched into St-Pierre’s old bones. “We have good food and good wine, so it’s still paradise,” he said.
Claimed by France in 1536, the archipelago spent the next few centuries in a colonial tug of war with Britain before becoming French for good in the early 1800s, the result of negotiations to preserve France’s access to the cod then teeming in its surrounding waters.
During Prohibition, U.S. bootleggers used these shores as a hub for Canadian liquor smuggled into the United States. In the Second World War, supporters of the French Resistance seized the islands, which were then a colony under Vichy rule.
In the 1970s, Canada and France established a maritime boundary between Newfoundland and the archipelago. But they continued to dispute fishing rights until 1992, leaving a baguette-shaped corridor to international waters.
An international moratorium on cod and flounder that year cost hundreds of jobs, which have not returned.
“We are still looking for our economic future but haven’t found it,” Karine Claireaux, St-Pierre’s mayor and a French senator, said.