Tiny former fishing village along Newfoundland's south coast considering resettlement

Residents of a former fishing village alongNewfoundland's remote southern coast are considering whether to packup and leave everything behind for good.

The people of Gaultois have signalled to the province theywould like to be resettled through the province's communityrelocation program a controversial government-led practice withroots in the 1950s.

But whether it happens through the program or not, Gaultois Innmanager Susan Hunt says the town will likely be empty in a fewdecades anyway.

"The community's getting older and there are no young ones,"Hunt, 71, said Tuesday. "People are dying off."

Many in the village are older and getting sick, and they'll needto move toward larger centres to be closer to medical care, she said.

Gaultois is one of five communities along Newfoundland's southerncoast inaccessible by road to get there, visitors must take aferry or helicopter. Its population has fallen from what Huntestimates was about 700 people in the early 1980s to fewer than 100people.

The town has voted on resettlement before, but the percentage ofvoters in favour was less than 90 per cent the previous provincialthreshold to trigger relocation efforts. In October the provincelowered that threshold to 75 per cent and residents once againcontacted government officials to launch a relocation request.

It's a complicated process, involving several steps. So far, apreliminary vote suggested more than 75 per cent of the 78respondents wanted to move, the provincial Department of Municipaland Provincial Affairs said in an email Tuesday.

Hunt said the government is determining the residents' residency,adding that people have been asked to complete a form asking howlong they have lived in Gaultois and whether they owned their ownhouse and for how long. Residents could be paid up to $270,000 toleave their homes behind.

Emotional Issue

Resettlement is an emotional issue in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Authors like Michael Crummey and visual artists like David Blackwoodhave made stinging, powerful work about the practice, which hassometimes involved families floating their wooden houses across theocean to a new community closer to government services.

Hunt said nobody in Gaultois likes to talk about the potentialmove.

"The subject never comes up," she said not even at the recentCanada Day celebration at the community centre.

The provincial government began resettling communities in the1950s, shortly after the province's Confederation with Canada. Thepractice accelerated after the 1992 moratorium on commercial codfishing, which wiped out jobs and livelihoods for over 30,000people.

Hunt said she moved to Gaultois in the 1960s when she was a teenager. Her father worked on fishing trawlers that sailed out of the community, and he wanted his family to be close when he returned from his trips, she said. There was a fish plant operating in the town when she arrived, and most people worked there or on the boats.

"The place was booming then," she said.

The plant was operated by several companies over the years before it closed for good in 2009. There are now four students left at the school, though a local woman had twins 18 months ago, Hunt said.

Still, the Gaultois Inn does fairly well a lot of people fromacross the province and the country who are curious about the towncome to stay, she said.

Hunt wasn't keen to speak about how she felt about resettlement.

"I'll go with the flow," she said. "I'm not going to say I'magainst it or I'm for it; I'll just go along with everybody else."

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