Newfoundland’s toughest question of all—how to keep the young from leaving—was something the Royal Commission left alone. Perhaps it knew the answer and felt it better left unsaid. After all, Clyde Wells had swept to power in 1989 with the help of an impassioned call for jobs that might bring loved ones back from the mainland. One 1999 study even claimed that, at the rate people were leaving, by 2030 the population level would fall to what it was fifty years earlier when Newfoundland first became part of Canada. Another, kinder study done for the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies projected on the basis of current trends that the population in 2036 will equal that of 1960.
Bonavista is typical. Since the fishery went down, the once-bustling little town has lost more than a thousand residents—one in every five— and almost all of them young people who headed off to find their futures in some place that was not Bonavista and did not involve a collapsing fishery. Mayor Betty Fitzgerald was sitting on seventeen different committees trying to figure out how to bring new hope and new work to her little town. There’d been a few nibbles from tourism, but tourism, like the former fishery, is seasonal.
It would never be the magic formula so desperately required.
THE SEARCH FOR NEW IDEAS is nothing new in Newfoundland. Fears that the fisheries alone would never be enough were voiced from the day it entered Confederation. “We must develop or perish,” Joey Smallwood told Newfoundlanders. “We must develop or our people will go in the thousands to other parts of Canada. We must create new jobs, or our young men especially will go off to other places to get the jobs they can’t get here.”
Smallwood created an Economic Development Department in 1950 and put a mysterious Latvian, Dr. Alfred Valdmanis, in charge, paying him the unheard-of salary of $25,000 a year to come up with new ideas. The department built a chocolate factory in Bay Roberts, a battery plant in Topsoil, a glove factory in Carbonear, a leather goods factory in Harbour Grace, a rubber boot factory in Holyrood. There was a knitting mill, a cement plant, a shoe factory—all founded on Valdmanis’s ill-founded theory that a war-damaged Europe would never recover its industrial might in time to hold on to its traditional markets. “As from the spring of 1952,” Valdmanis confidently predicted, “there won’t be further unemployment in Newfoundland.”
Valdmanis, of course, failed to recognize the Marshall Plan’s effect on Europe’s recovery. The projects failed. Doug Letto, the St. John’s author of Chocolate Bars and Rubber Boots, calculates that over six years the schemes ate up $26 million. Following decades would see the Come-By-Chance oil refinery, the Marystown Shipyard, a phosphorus reduction plant, a scheme to produce hydroponic cucumbers, plans for forest products, iron ore, oil and gas, nickel—all held to be the answer, with some outright disasters, the others never quite answer enough.
As Newfoundlanders themselves often say, “Pigs may fly, but they’re very unlikely birds.”
“Our young are gone,” the mayor of Bonavista said. “There’s nothing here for them. Since 1992 it’s been a struggle to keep as many people here as you can.” The facts back her up. According to a telling chart in the St. John’s Telegraph, the province’s population numbered 570,181 in 1984, among them 52,963 men and 52,520 women in the twenty to twenty-nine age group. Twenty years later the population had fallen to 517,027 with only 33,299 men and 34,955 women in their twenties. It was pretty obvious who was getting out. And with 20 percent of the 2004 population above age fifty-five, it was equally obvious who was staying on.
After touring the province with a microphone open to anyone who wished to step up, the Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada reported in 2003. “Into it, predictably,” wrote my Globe and Mail colleague Jeffrey Simpson, “poured a torrent of grievances, a deep sense of unfair treatment and misunderstanding from Canada, and revisionist histories of the good old days.”
The report moved beyond any obsessive griping and recommended ways to improve federal–provincial relations and encourage Canada to show a little more federal sympathy for the special needs of Newfoundland and Labrador. Not surprisingly, it called for greater federal spending on such matters as highways, fisheries science, health, and hydroelectric development.
It did not, however, touch on the impossible topic of the emptying out, the decline of rural Newfoundland that proved so disruptive in the years of Smallwood and will only worsen in the years to come. While only 20 percent of Canada’s population still lives on the land, Newfoundland has twice that amount and no idea how to keep so many there. Certainly not with the St. John’s area thriving and Alberta calling.
The Royal Commission was “stumped,” said Simpson, “although of course it did not say so. All it could recommend, for which it should not be blamed, was an ‘informed public dialogue on the future of rural Newfoundland’ and a provincial strategy.
“At least it did not draw castles in the sky, for which we can all be grateful.”
Fourteen
City Elephant, Country Mouse
GERALD MERKEL and Connie Smith are two rural born and raised Canadians who have decided to go different routes. Merkel, who’s in his mid-forties—quite young by Saskatchewan farm standards—is remaining as a grain farmer near Raymore, Saskatchewan, and Smith, who’s nineteen, has left the tiny outport fishing community of Brookside on Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay for the lure of booming Fort McMurray and the northern Alberta oilfields.
One staying on the land; one headed for the city.
On the day I came to visit Gerald Merkel, whom I’ve known for many years, the Saskatchewan countryside was so spectacularly beautiful it seemed the world should be not slipping away but rushing toward it. The trees and fields were covered with a mid-winter hoarfrost and, in the bright sun of the world’s biggest sky, made diamonds and lace of the entire province. I drove up through the spectacular Qu’Appelle Valley and continued north past Raymore toward the Merkel farm. As I left the highway and turned onto the concession roads, three mule deer bounded from one field and, as if on pogo sticks, bounced across the road and over another fence and away into the sparkling tangle of alders and wolf willow.
It would be difficult to imagine a scene more idyllic—or more concealing. Like the Potemkin village that hid reality behind fresh paint, false fronts, and smiling faces, the hoarfrost and the sunlight made it virtually impossible to take in the canola crop that had remained frozen in the fields. The fresh-fallen snow also covered the spot just behind the barn where, earlier in the year, Gerald had accidentally run over his father, George—and not only once, but twice.
Accidents happen, and on the farm far more readily than anywhere else. Gerald had been backing his pickup and an attached fertilizer trailer up to the holding tank and George Merkel had hurried over behind the trailer to help line things up. It moved more quickly than he’d expected, and as he tried to get out of the way he stumbled and went down, calling out for Gerald to stop. The roar of the truck engine drowned out his shouts and the large trailer drove right over him.
Gerald hadn’t seen his father go down. He’d felt the bump but put it down to uneven ground. He decided he’d have to adjust his approach and pulled forward again—running the machinery over his father a second time.
As Gerald shifted the trailer into better position he caught sight of something unusual out the side mirror.
It was his father.
“I was sure he was gone,” remembered Gerald, a heavyset man with thick hair, beard, and glasses. “He just lay there not moving. When I got to him he looks up and says, “‘Don’t worry, I’m not dead yet.’”
George Merkel was eighty-two years old when he was run over twice by his son. He had survived the Second World War and he would survive this, but not before spending months in the Regina hospital and then the little Lestock hospital down Highway 15 recovering from a shattered leg, broken ribs, and a punctured lung. He prided himself on the fact that the surgeon who operated on him in Regina walked in one day, picked up George’s chart, and
shook his head. “You’re one tough son of a bitch, you know,” the doctor said. George was. He blamed himself, not his son. When you’ve spent your entire life farming you know only too well how these things can happen.
George Merkel had seen bad times before. He remembered when the banks and government programs persuaded prairie farmers to expand during the 1970s only to have rising interest rates hit them like a year-round frost. He’d already sold off his cattle years earlier and cut back on his planting. He hadn’t really expected his son to go into farming but was quietly happy when he did.
Unfortunately, the Merkel farm was irrational by now. Too small to sustain a family, perhaps too small even for a single man living with his aging father. According to Ingeborg Boyens in Another Season’s Promise: Hope and Despair in Canada’s Farm Country, between 1936 and 1996 average farm size in Saskatchewan increased from 400 to 1152 acres and the number of farms dropped from 142,391 to 55,995. In subsequent years that number has fallen even further. The common refrain has been “Get Big, or Get Out.”
But Gerald Merkel had neither the capacity to get big nor the inclination to get out. He was stubborn, stubborn as his father, stubborn as generations of pioneers who simply kept believing in next year’s crop. He wasn’t particularly aware of conventional wisdom and most assuredly not interested in it.
“Some mainstream economists have written off the rural and would say this is the natural death of communities that cannot compete,” Alberta political scientist Roger Epp, a Saskatchewan native, told the Regina Leader-Post. “What if you are rural people rooted four generations deep in prairie soil and you are attached to that place in ways that don’t make sense in the current economy, which tells you to get mobile and find a job? How do you articulate that and how do you defend it?”
Gerald Merkel was determined to defend his right to stay on the land and attempt to make a go of it. He set out to expand to a sensible, workable size. He rented five quarter sections from neighbours and seven quarter sections from Fred Whitlock to the south of town. That gave him 3.5 sections, 2240 acres of good land to work, and he covered his bets by planting an assortment of wheat, peas, canola, and flax.
So far it had worked. His credit line was shrinking, his rental base growing. He supplied most of his own seed. He had his own equipment, his father’s equipment, and access to Fred Whitlock’s equipment. Still, a year of planting and fertilizing was running him $150,000. He was deep into the Credit Union.
The year began with the accident, but by mid-summer he was convinced things had turned in his favour. He had a wonderful crop, the best ever, and when the flax was blooming sea blue the Merkel and Whitlock farms had never looked better under the big Saskatchewan sky.
But nature, as Thoreau noted so long ago, “is no saint.” On August 20, with the bumper crop only two weeks from the start of harvest, Gerald fell asleep while watching television. When he awoke it was 3:00 a.m., and as he made his way to his bedroom he stopped by the window and checked the thermometer.
–3°C.
He stared at it for a moment and then decided there was nothing he could do but head for bed. He didn’t even bother to wake his father.
“What was the point?” he said. “We were screwed.”
Only a small portion of the crop was salvageable. The canola Gerald simply left in the field, hoping beyond hope that it would cure out enough in spring to still be worth something, however minuscule. With rent due and loans overdue, Gerald Merkel figured he was out $100,000, with no prospects of planting in the coming spring unless enough federal and provincial aid came through to bail out those farmers who trusted more in themselves than insurance.
“This was my worst year,” he said. “We’ve had earlier frosts before, but this year everything was so late. Two more weeks would have made all the difference. Now it just doesn’t add up.
“She’s beyond crying.”
IN 2006 CONNIE SMITH moved from Brookside, Newfoundland, to Fort McMurray, Alberta, from a tiny village to the country’s fastest-growing new city. And in Fort McMurray she found everything that little Brookside couldn’t possibly provide a nineteen-year-old eager to head out into the world and see what life had to offer.
Smith and her boyfriend, Raphael Murphy, had come to the right place. The oil sands were booming, with nearly seventy projects now producing more than a million barrels of oil a day, roughly half the country’s production. One study embraced by the local chamber of commerce was claiming that $125 billion worth of oil sands investment would be coming into the municipality of Wood Buffalo over the coming decade. Smith was in Fort McMurray barely a day when she got a good job as a waitress—$7 an hour and healthy tips in a restaurant with a perpetual waiting line.
The population, thanks to hundreds and thousands of Connie Smiths and Raphael Murphys arriving through the year, had roared past seventy thousand. New houses, new malls, new roads, new bridges were all in the works. Connie and Raphael were already talking about buying a four-by-four pickup now that Raphael was working in the oil sands and bringing home a regular paycheque. They were dreaming about a brand-new home a few more years down the road. What they weren’t considering was heading back east. Connie’s sister was already here. A brother was elsewhere in Alberta. A cousin was expected to arrive any day.
They had a bit of Newfoundland in this northern Alberta city. There were bars that catered to Newfoundlanders, and a special club that featured bands from Down East. Some estimates had as many as twenty-five thousand Newfoundlanders in the booming city, approximately one of every three citizens, with more on the way. No wonder one St. John’s restaurant put a sign up in the summer of 2006 saying, “If you are NOT going to Alberta, apply within.”
Connie Smith plastered the walls of her room with photographs of back home. There were pictures of her parents—her mother died several years ago and her father had a new partner—as well as photographs of siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, all smiling in little Brookside.
“I miss them,” she said on a bright September day in 2006. “But I like it here. We’re here for the long run.”
It was enough to cause tears back home. Her father, Onslow Smith, and his common-law wife, Margaret, had already left Brookside and moved to somewhat larger New Harbour. It didn’t really matter where they lived, though; there had been no work for Onslow since the fish plant closed at Marystown. Their children were all now in Alberta. The neighbour children back in Brookside had also left for Fort McMurray. The emptying out had been so profound that Onslow and Margaret found little Brookside, where about thirty families continue to live, just too painful a reminder of what they’d lost.
But Margaret said she understood why it had happened. “I guess I would go, too,” she said over the telephone forty-two hundred kilometres away, “if I were younger.
“But if I had my choice, you know, I’d never leave here. Ever.”
FOLLOWING A DAY at the Merkel farm I drove up to Saskatoon to see Ashley O’Sullivan, president of the University of Saskatchewan’s research-and-development wing, Ag-West Bio. O’Sullivan is among the many, many agricultural experts who’d say that the Gerald Merkels of the prairies are an unfortunate anachronism, well intentioned but out of touch with modern reality. As Wallace Stegner put it, a pattern no longer viable.
“In the last century,” says O’Sullivan, “it was called ‘farming.’”
The last century, of course, closed out only a very few years ago. What O’Sullivan discussed for this century was the “bio-economy,” a catchphrase encompassing scientific research, new technology, and farm methods that bear little resemblance to time-honoured prairie traditions.
O’Sullivan spoke of using genetics to create new value in crop production, of using molecular technology to change breeding as dramatically as the development of hybrids once transformed farm practices. He even saw a future where it might not be necessary to spray for insects and blight. “Fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years from now,” he said, “
we won’t think of farming as farming any more. We’ll think of it as capturing value from biological initiatives. We’re at the infancy stage here. I call it the Model T stage—we’re just starting out. This will be the economy of the future.”
Gerald Merkel begs to differ. He believes, because he has no other choice but to believe, that the family farm will always matter in Saskatchewan, will always be at the core of this province. Neither he nor his father blames anything but fate and the elements for what happened to that so-promising crop. A family doesn’t spend three generations on the same plot of land and not come to terms with nature’s fickleness.
“It happens,” Gerald said as we sat drinking coffee in his kitchen.
“If you think too much about it,” added George, still wearing a huge brace on his left leg, “you’re going to go bugs.”
His son stirred his coffee, steam rising and vanishing, and stared out at the snow that was once again starting to fall. “There’s always next year,” he said, determined to plant again. “It’s agriculture, after all—people have to eat.”
PEOPLE HAVE TO EAT, and farmers, by nature, have to look ahead. “Hope,” Nellie McClung said back in the grim days of the Great Depression, “is still the dominant sentiment out there, after all the tragedy. And where hope is, there you have power. And I believe that Southern Saskatchewan’s best days are before her yet.”
She could still be right. Eric Howe, the University of Saskatchewan economics professor who caused such a row when he tagged Saskatchewan “the Mississippi of the North,” was also oddly hopeful. He wasn’t about to back down from his controversial phrase—racism and poverty are easily found in both southern state and northern province— but overall prospects had begun changing as Saskatchewan and Alberta celebrated their centennials. “I think it’s going to be very interesting watching this change,” Howe said when I spoke to him in Saskatoon.
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