It's a sad story, but a familiar one in a country built on natural resources and now leaving them behind.
In the 1980s, when the fishery was in its heyday, Black Tickle was a Labrador boom town. There were 3,000 people and the shore of the Island of Ponds was littered with trailers and cheap shacks. A global fleet jammed the harbour and there were jobs for all who wanted one. One woman remembers earning more than $500 a week in the fish plant – when she was 16.
And then the bust came. The trailers emptied, the shacks were torn down and the fishing fleet vanished.
A community based on cod was left reeling by the federal moratorium on the fishery. Its population has plunged by 95 per cent and residents now fear that the place is dying before their eyes. Those who remain look old beyond their years, eking out an existence foreign to most Canadians.
“We are really, really poor,” says Dominique Keefe, who is 15 and in Grade 10.
Having lost its economic reason for being, Black Tickle needs a new one. And it's not alone. From mining to logging and pulp and paper, resource-based communities across the country have been struggling for years to survive and, with the increasing pace and potentially radical impact of climate change, many smaller centres soon may follow.
In fact, given the persistent notion that global warming is partly to blame for the cod's collapse, Black Tickle may be in the climate vanguard.
OIL MONEY
Trevor Taylor, the minister in St. John's responsible for rural development, says his department can't save every ailing community, but small-town depopulation is high on the agenda of a government that is flush with oil money and equipped with a strong new mandate from the voters.
This week, he says, the government brought together more than 100 community, business and social leaders to meet politicians and bureaucrats – and to work on a rural strategy to carry the province until 2020. “We've had our time trying to attract hockey-stick factories and rubber-boot factories or whatever a few decades ago,” Mr. Taylor explains. “For much of Newfoundland and Labrador, the success of rural communities depends on building small and medium-sized businesses.”
He says his department has almost $30-million for rural development and spends much of it on economic diversification, usually putting up one dollar for every three invested by the private sector.
That ratio is a problem for Black Tickle, where money is so scarce that many people use “honey buckets” instead of installing septic systems and empty their waste at the town dump or in the harbour.
The island has no water distribution system and the treatment plant is several kilometres from town. There are also no trees, so residents must travel 50 to 80 kilometres to fetch firewood. There is no fixed link to the mainland and the coastal ferry can't run year-round.
It's too expensive to “eat from the shops,” so people fish and hunt for food, although nerves become frayed when the stores run out of cigarettes.
Fishermen now rely on marine species, such as whelk, that they never used to bother with. Government make-work projects help people log the 400-odd hours they need for employment benefits, but many must augment their income by picking bakeapples, as cloud berries are known in this part of the world.
“But the bakeapples won't last forever,” said Clement Keefe, 54. “People are going out too early and picking too many of them.”
Most of the 200 or so people who remain are either Keefes or Dysons, sprawling extended families with deep roots in the community. Some have stayed because they love Black Tickle and others because they felt that they had no choice.
“Most of the people have no education, degrees or anything,” said David Dyson, who spends part of his time here, but has his permanent home in Goose Bay, more than an hour away by air. “They can't go outside and pay thousands of dollars for a house.”
But the young people are voting with their feet, and the population has dropped by 100 in the past six years.
