Life Lessons - The Price of Progress

This past weekend my last surviving Aunt, my Father’s sister, Rita Dwyer, passed away in the town of Norris Arm at the age of 89. She will be sorely missed.

Aunt Rita (we always called her “Reet”) was a wonderful woman, salt of the earth as they say, and she will not be forgotten.

I bring her passing to your attention not because you may have known her personally but because many of us have known someone just like her over the years. A solid and dependable woman who married (twice in her case having lost her first husband at an early age), raised a family and ended a long and full existence in the same small town in which she was born.

With out-migration, labor mobility and all the other forms of rural exodus we are so used to these days, Rita’s style of life has become somewhat of a rarity, one that most of us will never know.

When I first heard of my Aunt’s passing my thoughts were not of her death so much as about her life. I found myself pondering all the things she must have witnessed in her nearly 90 years in that small town.

Born just after the end of World War I she would have grown up during the great depression and lived through the tuberculosis epidemic that ravaged Newfoundland’s people.

No doubt there were days when most things were in short supply. A time when not living, but survival itself, was the order of the day.

Being raised in a small community there may not have been much, but her family (my family really), grew their own vegetables and had a ready supply of milk from the family goat, both of which could always be supplemented with fish, caribou, rabbit and a variety of other wild game.

As she grew Rita would have had a front row seat to Newfoundland’s era as an independent dominion. She would have seen first hand the financial collapse that led to the commission of government and she knew full well the painful and often corrupt campaigns that brought her once sovereign homeland into confederation with Canada. A campaign that fostered heated battles and life long divides not only among neighbors and friends but even among members of the same family.

Aunt Rita well remembered the trains and how they carried thousands of American service men to the town regularly during World War II. How the soldiers would spend a few days at camp before moving on once again to far off destinations, perhaps never to return.

After having raised a family just mere feet from that railway track, she would later look out her window and witness the dismantling of the rail line in the 1980’s. All that remains running past her house these days is a gravel trail and a near constant cloud of dust kicked up by all terrain vehicles.

Aunt Rita grew up in a time when the fishery was indeed the backbone of Newfoundland and Labrador. Her second husband, Bill Dwyer, who like her first also predeceased her, was a small boat fisherman and as my Father often calls him, “a hard nosed sealer”. Aunt Rita often saw him go out to the ice in the Spring and no doubt she wondered if he would return. He always did.

During her early days the harbor at Norris Arm was alive with boats of every description. Wharves dotted the shore line and the water’s edge, like the local train station, was always a beehive of activity. That was the sort of life she grew up with.

In the 1990’s she, like all Newfoundlanders and Labradorians witnessed the collapse of the cod stocks and along with it saw most of the young people move away leaving only the older generation to continue on.

Today the one remaining wharf in the community is the so called government wharf. All the small family ones are long gone, as are the fishing boats. Now, even the odd pleasure boat entering the harbor is an oddity.

During my Aunt's lifetime nations have risen and fallen. Men have visited the moon and returned to tell about it. Communications technology has advanced from large, crackly radio sets to high speed internet and cell phones. Horses and oxen have given way to trucks and quads.

Cities have grown and prospered yet towns just like the one where my Aunt was born, married, raised a family and died continue to disappear every day.

It makes me wonder if “progress” is the right word under the circumstances and at what price progress simply becomes too expensive.

Thankfully my Aunt, God rest her soul, won’t be around to see how it all turns out.

God speed Aunt Rita.

Putting a Human Face on Outmigration

Work in Alberta may be helping many Newfoundlanders and Labradorians survive in today's economic situation but there is a human toll to be paid. The following article from the Canadian Press points to one such case.

Out-migration of men to Alberta leaves families without fathers in rural N.L.

MARYSTOWN, N.L. — Tyson Farewell counts the number of sleeps he has left until his dad returns home.

"He lit up just like a tree," his grandmother Vivian Farewell says, recalling the last time the boy saw his father. But after a week of having dad at home, three-year-old Tyson acts out. He doesn't understand why his father has to leave, but knows his departure is inevitable.

"He'll be saying, 'Dad, dad,' going looking for him upstairs, crying," Vivian says.

"It's hard. It's sad."

Calvin Farewell, like thousands of Newfoundlanders, is a 20-and-eight father.

They're the men who work in Alberta's oilsands for 20 days, living in work camps on the outskirts of Fort McMurray.

They fly home to communities throughout Newfoundland and Labrador, often all expenses paid, where they play catch up with their wives and children for eight days.

A child's first words, another's graduation are missed because the men can't afford to skip work.

"For some reason or other, each time I do have to go away, I always miss out on something," Michael Murray says during one of his eight-day turnarounds.

"You do get lonely and you long for home."

The 59-year-old had spent nearly all of his working life at the local shipyard.

But last fall the welder found himself in a predicament that thousands of Newfoundlanders before him have faced. Murray lost his job.

The bills continued to pile, so he packed his bags and joined those Newfoundlanders working in the oilsands of Alberta.

"Unemployment is not my game," Murray says.

As mayor of Marystown and a guidance counsellor at a local elementary school, Sam Synard has seen first-hand the effects that out-migration has had on families.

"I know of many people who are now into this lifestyle who were, for the most part, from very strong nuclear families. Mom and dad were home everyday. They sat around the kitchen table every night," he says.

"All of a sudden this is a new lifestyle now where dad is gone for the majority of the time. How long can families survive like this?"

The increasingly prevalent face of the family unit in rural Newfoundland is missing something: a father.
The provincial government estimates that anywhere from three to five per cent of its workforce - roughly 6,000 to 10,000 people - leave Newfoundland for work. The majority of them are men.

The men go back and forth for work instead of moving their families to Alberta because, they say, they don't want to trade their relatively laid-back quality of life for the traffic congestion and higher housing prices that have resulted from the province's booming oilsands.

While out-migration has sapped Atlantic Canada of its workforce for years, Marystown has seen more of its men leave than many other communities.

The south coast town, which is celebrating its come home year, has lost 1,300 people - 19 per cent of its population - in the last decade.

The community of 5,400 and dropping was once one of the province's most prosperous towns. The construction of a fish plant and shipyard in the 1960s attracted young families in droves.

But since the closure of the cod fishery more than 15 years ago, the plant doesn't operate at the capacity it once did.

If not for infrequent work commissioned by the province's offshore oil industry, the shipyard would often stand idle.

"We haven't built a fishing boat here now for 20 years," says Henry Moores, president of a local union.
The sign leading to Marystown on the Burin Peninsula Highway is telling: From dories to drill rigs.

Today, Marystown is a poaching ground for oil companies out west looking to expand their operations, offering a labour force with highly coveted skills because of its once-booming shipbuilding industry.

Welders, pipefitters and electricians find they can ply their trade for $100,000-plus in Alberta, with perks to boot.

"If you have it on your resume that I'm a former employee of the Marystown shipyard, the large companies in Alberta would almost send a private jet to get you," Synard says.

In fact, the migratory workforce is what's driving the Marystown economy.

Families who previously couldn't afford to are now buying gas-guzzling pickup trucks and renovating the homes they recently furnished with new appliances.

As the operator of a hair salon, Darlene Mayo has reaped the rewards of a town eager to dig into its deep pockets.

When she began the home business 25 years ago, she had one assistant.

In the last three years, however, business has tripled and she has hired two hairdressers and three assistants.
"People have lots of money to spend, on themselves, on their children, on their grandchildren, because there's just so much money," Mayo says.

"If there was no Alberta, it would be a pretty sad Newfoundland."

But as a mother of a 13-year-old boy and wife of an electrician working in Alberta, Mayo says she'd prefer to have her family home.

"I am used to him being gone, but it still doesn't come any easier," she says. "As the years go by, it's almost worse."

Mayo has also seen the failed relationships and broken marriages that can come as an unintended consequence of out-migration.

"People go up there, meet somebody else and of course, they don't come back," she says. "Or the wife hooking up with somebody on this end because she's bored to death. The husband is gone. She has all this money, starts buying new clothes, gets a new look, gets new hair and all of a sudden, she's a new person."

The province is more affluent than it's ever been and is on the cusp of greater fortune.

Newfoundland is about to enter a period of unprecedented and sustained economic growth, largely fuelled by expansions in the energy sector.

But the constant exodus of people and the repercussions that have come with that are creating a problem that was unheard of in the past.

There are not enough people to fill jobs.

"We need to retain our young people, attract back those who have left the province and ensure that Newfoundland and Labrador is their province of choice for now and into the future," Premier Danny Williams said recently.

"It's not always a bad thing to move away and experience new things, but ultimately we want our young people to settle and prosper right here at home."

His government recently awarded a $50.5-million contract to the Marystown shipyard to build two ferries.
The project is expected to provide full-time employment for 150 people for a year.

Later this year, Ottawa is expected to announce whether it will award a $2.9-billion deal to Marystown to assemble three ships for the Canadian navy. Victoria is also vying for that contract.

"We're just waiting with bated breath," Synard says.

"You'd bring a lot of these people home."