All Residents Leave Canadian Island After Government Cuts Off Power. One Couple Remains.

On Little Bay Islands, a town in Newfoundland and Labrador,  after the Canadian government issued a December 31 deadline after which all services, including electricity, would be shut down, all the residents left.

Except one couple.

Mike and Georgina Parsons stayed behind after the other 69 residents of the ghost town evacuated. The only fish plant in the town closed in 2011; the only school shut down in 2015. The Daily Mail noted, “According to official data, the government will save roughly $20 million over the next two decades from the relocation. The savings will mostly come from cutting the ferry service to the island.” 

The Parsons have spent $50,000, including getting a solar power system and a fresh water well,  stored medication, dry and canned goods, as well as six freezers with protein, enough to last them for two years, they told CTV News.

The Parsons own half-a-dozen boats, though the winter arctic ice could keep them isolated for six weeks in the winter. In October, Georgina Parsons said, “We’re not nervous at all. It still feels a bit unreal.” Mike Parsons acknowledged, “The town has gotten much quieter… Every day now people are packing up and leaving.”

The government, trying to effect a resettlement program to relocate residents, has been accused by some residents of not remunerating them. They claimed that although they paid taxes, they weren’t compensated because they didn’t live there all year. The government claimed in 2017 that 55 of the 76 residents then living in the town were permanent residents. The government paid those 55 residents a total of $8.7 million.

Juanita and Gord Hull, who left the town after Gord had a stroke in 2003, told CBC that they were not compensated although they had lived in the town for roughly 70 years.Juanita Hull stated, “I was hurt and I thought we was discriminated (against). There’s bad feelings. And the ones like myself, got turned down, they feels exactly the same way that I do.” 

Doris Tucker echoed said: “I felt insulted. And I felt, you know, of anyone — I was born there in 1939, I went to school there, and I worked there.’

A spokesperson for the Department of Municipal Affairs stated, “A person’s place of birth, or where they spent most of their life, does not constitute a person being a resident of a community. A person may be born in a community and live there for 50 years, but if they, at some point prior the community’s relocation request, move to, and reside in another community, they cease to be a permanent resident.” The department added, “The funding provided to eligible permanent residents is not intended to compensate for the value of their property. As such, persons with permanent residences outside the community do not require financial assistance to relocate.”

CBC noted, “A permanent resident is defined as an individual who ‘lives and sleeps year-round, 365 days per year,’ on Little Bay Islands — subject to some conditions. Those conditions allow for temporary absences for vacations, work or caregiving, and more extended absences for those in prison or accessing ongoing health care treatment if ‘substantiated by a doctor’s note.'”