“Post Office Box 3, McCallum, Newfoundland, A0H 2J0,” I reply. “Would you like me to spell McCallum
for you?”

“I need your street address, sir.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t have one.”

“I need the street name and number on the building you want us to send your parcel to,” she repeats in that odd way that is neither offensive nor friendly. It’s just—there. The kind of voice that sounds more like an automated answering machine than it does a breathing human being.

“Yes, I understand what you’re asking for,” I say. “It’s just that I live in an isolated Newfoundland outport, where there are no streets, resulting in no street names or house numbers. I’m a ninety-minute boat ride from the nearest road.”

“I need a street address or the courier won’t be able to find your home,” she insists.

I stifle a laugh. Sort of. “No courier will be coming here, my dear. I can guarantee you that. Plus, my neighbours and I have ordered many couriered packages previously, using nothing more than the PO Boxes that Canada Post provides, and the items we order always arrive.”

“Sir, our system only allows us to enter a street name and house number.”

“Okay, that’s another story—that’s more about insufficient software than it is your resistance to new knowledge, so I’ll give you a fake address. It will implicate us both in federal mail fraud, but I’ll gladly lie to you if that’s your employer’s preference.”

Silence.

My move. “Oh, look at that! I’ve got an address right here: 23 Jas Rose Point [or 16 Long Shore Road, or . . .], McCallum, Newfoundland A0H 2J0.”

“Spell McCallum please.”

Fact is, you can send mail to “The Feller from Away, A0H 2J0,” and it will reach me. There are seventy-nine people at this postal code. None live more than a kilometre from everyone else. I’m sure our postmistress, Sharon Feaver, can figure it out.

Despite government efforts to kill us off, Canada is a big country that still contains a considerable rural population. It’s easy to forget this when you live in a large urban centre, where services are readily available and geared to meet the needs of the majority.

Try taking out home insurance when you live where I do, when the service provider needs to know if your foundation is full-height poured cement or a cinderblock crawl space. My house doesn’t have a foundation, I say. It sits on sticks. What I don’t tell them is, when my washing machine is on spin, a few of those pillars shake like loose shingles in an Ontario tornado. I don’t point out, “That’s my kettle on the stove that you hear rattling right now.”

It’s impossible to find a technician who can fix the faulty appliance that you purchased new the previous week. And good luck getting a mortgage when the lender asks how far you are from the nearest fire station. Even the federal gun registry isn’t set up to serve you, but I don’t recommend you use the word “fraud” with those guys.

None of these inconveniences is the end of the world, of course, but the lack of support regarding essential services can wear a person down after a while. All rural Canadians are marginalized in one way or another. They feel insignificant when the system is unaware of their plight and unworthy when others aren’t motivated to think outside the box on the rural resident’s behalf.

While far from perfect, I try to be aware of the day-to-day damage that results from my resistance to seeing the world in new and equitable ways, and I occasionally make an effort to initiate personal behavioural modifications in response. I say that “I occasionally make an effort” to change because doing so is always ultra-difficult. That’s why I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, because I find them too hard to keep. I think that recognizing the end of one year and the start of another helps me to count my blessings and consider my future, but if I wish to implement meaningful change, I don’t see the good in starting such a rigorous journey on a culturally assigned day. I believe that the best time for me to act on my ambitions should be based on my needs, not some calendar date that coincidentally arrives on one of the darkest days of the year, after a lengthy period of time when many of us have consumed insane amounts of food and alcohol and thrown away any semblance of healthy sleeping habits. I’ve learned that by establishing January 1 as the day to begin important projects, I won’t be in a good position to face the real possibility of needing to get on and off the wagon several times throughout the process. The date I set to spark change has to help me find all the stick-to-it toughness that I can assemble, if I hope to have any success at all.

I do, however, use the changing of the calendar year to reflect on my Newfoundland lifestyle, like how much I enjoy the many hours I spend alone reading and writing in my little McCallum home. I recall the fear that came with moving here, and I smile at the thought of all the supportive calls and emails I receive from those I care about on the mainland. I remember the McCallum folks who frequently feed me, and I dream of further travelling Newfoundland, continuing to use this community as my basecamp. From Stephenville to St. John’s, up and down the Northern Peninsula, all along the northeast shore, and south to St. Pierre, I’d never have seen what I have without the stability that McCallum provides.

More than anything though, I smile at the thought of all the days I spend at sea, because that’s a large part of what my Newfoundland life is. I love the open ocean. As physically punishing as ocean excursions are, they bring me extreme joy. A rough and tough boat ride makes me feel very much awake in this world. I’m convinced that my time on the North Atlantic Ocean will be one of the more satisfying things that I think about while lying on my deathbed one day.

But with an awareness that I won’t always be able to take the beating that comes with life on the sea comes the conscious knowledge that I’m nowhere near willing to give this adventurous world up. So while I resist New Year’s resolutions, I do believe in recurring commitments, including one that I have to consistently maintain and continuously improve upon—the need to take care of myself. It’s always been day-to-day for me. I’m an excessively greedy eater. If there is fat, salt, or sugar in my home, I’ll inhale it. Yet taking the pounding that comes with life at sea requires a strong back, a healthy heart, loose limbs, and an alert brain. Achieving these qualities requires regular exercise, good food choices, and a curious mind — a way of living worth nurturing because I dream of participating in bodily challenging adventures for as long as life will let me.

In fog thick as motor oil, no one knows where we are. I ask the man who does the driving why we aren’t carrying a compass. “The man who does the driving” is Junior Feaver, husband of Sharon, McCallum’s previously noted postmistress. Junior and Sharon are not thrilled at the thought of seeing their name in print, so I do what I can to respect their concerns, without it costing me my story. This modesty that the two of them demonstrate is not uncommon in McCallum. Lloyd and Linda Durnford share a similar refrain, as does Sarah Fudge’s husband, Matt. So, know that despite my occasional underuse of certain individuals’ names, these people are incredibly important players in my narrative.

“The swell is always from the sou’west, so I know where we are,” Junior patiently points out. “I just don’t know where we are.” I take this to mean he could easily find land if he had to, but he can’t guarantee where along that coastline we currently are. So, as we move through fog towards unidentified terra firma, no one knows what dangers sit below the surface. Given the seriousness of the situation, I decide not to ask how anyone can possibly read what direction the swell is coming from this morn, because with the sea so incredibly calm, the roll of the ocean is unreadable.

Junior cuts the engine and signals for quiet. He wants to see if he can hear water flowing against or over any rocks that might be too close for comfort. He can. But that critical realization is temporarily shelved when he spots me peering into the fog beyond the port side. “See something, Dave?” he asks.

“I thought I did,” I reply. “But perhaps I am wrong . . .”

Then it resurfaces—a forty-ton humpback whale, its hump a whole lot higher than me. Its massive tail, as it gives us a great wave, is a stunning mosaic of whites and greys. I dream of such sightings, and I’m excited that I’m the guy who spotted it first, because both events are rare; I simply don’t understand aquatic ecology like the rest of this gang does. They know so much more than me about where to look for action.

“Whoo-hoo!” I scream, and throw my arms in the air. But my quick-thinking, fast-acting, early forties skipper isn’t so thrilled. These fifty-foot marine mammals and the way they so suddenly fill the surface of the sea can easily flip a twenty-two-foot fibreglass boat and everybody in it. “You won’t be whoo-hooing if we hit her,” Junior firmly informs me as he efficiently works to move our vulnerable vessel out of harm’s way. “No sir, you won’t be so happy if we hit her.”

Then another appears. Another humpback. This one astern of the starboard. It is Junior who first sees the second one. Slightly smaller, but right alongside our boat, the possibility of disaster is no less unsettling. We’re surrounded. If I didn’t have great confidence in my captain, I’d have good reason to worry. Instead I am having fun watching sea monsters in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Opening day was another eye-opener. It felt like I was staring down the devil. The roar of the sea was thunderous, and the suck of the landwash awful. It was the worst weather I’d ever been in. As one veteran seaman from another crew kindly told me at the time, “You probably won’t see worse unless you get caught in something, because we don’t go out in worse than that.” In fact, if it hadn’t been opening day, I don’t believe we would have gone at all. We had a lot of pots to put in, and catching lobsters is competitive. So much so that if we fall behind, we’ll even work the occasional Sunday, an otherwise blasphemous act.

People from away don’t realize how small our boats are. They think we steam around in large longliners instead of little open motorboats. When it’s really rough, we travel in pairs—two boats keeping an eye on each other, just in case. That’s when I see what we’re up against, when I look over at our neighbour’s boat beside us and note that the only components touching the sea are their two heavy outboards and a couple feet of fibreglass while the rest of their vessel hangs ten off a fifteen-foot wave. So it’s easy to imagine that our boat is doing the same.

The wave action throws me around like I’m a tiny bag of lobster bait. But I’m not scared. Not that I’m not careful or aware of what could happen. Just that I think there is something that occurs in a physical crisis where my mind recognizes that panic is not going to be of any assistance and tells my body to get down to business. It’s only when I reflect a week or two later that I allow myself to realize what a wild time I’ve just lived through.

It is quite an operation—a father, four sons, and a mainlander, while Mom makes sure there is pea soup waiting when we get home. Or, as the old folks say about eating pea soup on Saturdays, we celebrate the devil’s birthday — a tenet I don’t trust, because I saw the devil that day, and he had no interest in partying. All he wanted to do was stir up trouble on thunderous seas and introduce me to a new level of danger.

There was a time in my Ontario life when I climbed trees for a living, carrying a running chainsaw with me as I went. I’ve assisted with the recovery of avalanche victims in Alberta and lowered skiers from dangling wires and tall towers when their gondola blew off in big winds. I worked at Ground Zero, New York, after the World Trade Center fell and everyone was still sensitive to the potential of another terrorist attack. Still, I believe commercial fishing is the most dangerous job in the world.

Police and firefighters have their moments where they see some horrible things, and, according to injury compensation claims, stevedores and demolition workers are frequently hurt at work. But braving the open ocean is clearly the riskiest job I’ve ever come across. For men and women to take on tasks that don’t pay enough to buy the best boats, technology, or safety wear is ambitious and brave. To go out in unpredictable weather over water so cold that, even if the fishers could swim, would kill them quite quickly is courageous.

I tell Junior, when he crawls out over our outboard motor to remove an errant rope from the propeller, “If you slip overboard, don’t worry, because I’ll have a gaff stuck in you before you know you’re wet. I’ll jam that sharp hook in your neck, kidney, or crotch,” I insist, “and I’ll pull you back on this boat before anyone notices you’re gone. So don’t you be afraid, old buddy you’ve got the feller from away watching out for you.”

Excerpted from Bay of Hope: Five Years in Newfoundland © David Ward, 2018. Published by ECW Press, ecwpress.com.

Newfoundland and Labrador’s unique culture has endured in part because its people are, in many ways, remarkably similar. But the Atlantic province faces a paradox: As its population shrinks, its shared ancestry will have to change significantly in order to survive. Now, a small group of scientists and entrepreneurs on the island are jumping on the chance to study this rare population before it has to change.

The province is full of people whose ancestors arrived from the British Isles, settled, and stayed put for centuries. As a result, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have a lack of genetic variation.

Researchers marvel at this homogeneity and what it can tell them about the island’s high rates of inherited conditions.

One local biotech, Sequence Bio, plans to gather the genomic information of 100,000 people in the province. The company is partnering with the provincial government and Cambridge-based researchers Genospace on the project, which they describe as “a large-scale precision medicine initiative…to collect and analyze genetic data for drug discovery and improved patient outcomes.”

Any health-related discoveries could be important to the province, which has a population older than the national average. That trend is expected to continue, says Keith Storey, director of the Harris Centre’s Population Project. “Overall the population will decline by about 10 percent” over the next 20 years, he says. During that same period, he adds, the province’s average age is expected to increase by five to eight years.

This is part of a snowball effect, Storey says, fuelled by a decreasing birth rate, out-migration of younger people, and a weak economy. The provincial government aims to counter it by doubling its immigration. If that is successful, the result will be a provincial shift towards decreased homogeneity.

That’s good news for health care providers grappling with diseases like diabetes and heart disease. But it might also bring up thorny questions about provincial cultural identity. The Sequence Bio project, expected to launch later this year, will likely find much that is the same about the people who currently inhabit Canada’s youngest province. But if all goes as planned, 20 years from now those results will be quite different.

A First Nations-led initiative in Manitoba will receive $19 million from the federal government to set up much-needed diabetes-related foot care services in the communities. The initiative is vital considering numbers showing that First Nations experience diabetes at a rate 4.2 times higher than the general population, but 34 of the 63 nations in the province had no diabetes service.

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Dwight Ball.

At a St. John’s rally on April 6, the day the provincial government released its 2017 budget, Michelle Keep addressed a crowd of about 40 protesters. “We need ideas outside the box,” she told them. “We need them now, we need them fast.”

Keep, a best-selling romance novelist based in St. John’s, has built her living on creativity and risk—and her experiences could hold one of the keys to the future of work for Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.

In 2016, the government of Dwight Ball made many cuts, including to education spending, libraries, and the civil service, and introduced a tax on books. The economy had been deeply reliant on royalties from offshore drilling, making $2.8 billion in 2011-12. In 2015-16, royalty revenues only reached $551 million.

As the government struggled to deal with a drop in resource extraction revenues and rising unemployment, it turned to austerity. Though revenues in 2017 had been higher than forecasted, activists rallying in St. John’s had expected the year’s budget to impose more cuts. The budget didn’t offer much relief for people struggling, with higher education hit the hardest.

Now, the province is banking on industry for its financial salvation: oil, gas, seafood, hydro, mining, lumber and agri-food. “In order to return to fiscal balance we must think and act in a way that is long term,” Minister of Finance Cathy Bennett said in her budget speech. “We can no longer afford to be bound by short-term reactionary thinking.”

But it’s hard to not see short-term reactionary thinking in Bennett’s budget. They’re short-term fixes in various resource industries designed to tide the province over until commodity prices pick back up. Bennett claims that with infrastructure spending, some jobs will be created. But it’s not nearly enough.

Unifor Atlantic regional director Lana Payne and economist Jim Stanford call the province’s economy a “helicopter economy,” in which natural resource companies generate a lot of profit, but not enough of it makes it to average people. As a resource-dependent province, Newfoundland and Labrador should be able to buoy public finances with revenues from extraction. But Payne says that the proportion of the province’s GDP that went to corporate profits when revenues were at a high of 37 percent. Nationally, the percentage is 15.

The solution to improve the province’s economy isn’t hard to see, but it requires political will and more control over industry by average people. “[The] emerging struggle is the same struggle we have always had here: keeping more of our wealth, using that wealth to diversify and share prosperity, and invest more in our creative industries, green jobs, etc.,” Payne writes in an email. The province, she adds, needs to entice more youth and more immigrants to live there. Choosing to make cuts in higher education suggests that the government is forging a different path.

If the government isn’t interested in creating or protecting new, good jobs in Newfoundland and Labrador, Keep’s vision for her province should inspire people to do the work themselves. “[O]nce you no longer have to guarantee a profit for the owners or investors, a business of any sort can often securely operate for the good of the workers, for the good of the customers, for the good of the whole community without worry,” she told the budget-day protesters. “All it requires… is a change in how we as a society, and the government, view things.”

Perhaps that’s the key: Start with society, and maybe government will follow.

Photo courtesy of SmartIce

The Inuit of Pond Inlet, Nunavut, have been navigating the sea ice for centuries, relying on their experience and wisdom from their elders to inform when and when not to travel across the frozen mass. But as global warming intensifies, the ice is becoming increasingly unpredictable and unsafe. Now, a project out of Memorial University in Newfoundland is working to change that.

“My colleagues and I wanted to help our community and try to address their concerns about the Arctic sea ice conditions,” says Andrew Arreak, a Pond Inlet resident and research coordinator for the project. SmartIce, a collaborative initiative between the Inuit community, the Nunatsiavut government in Newfoundland and Labrador, and Memorial University, uses high-tech sensors to monitor and track changes in sea ice, making it much safer for locals to tread upon.

During the uncharacteristically warm winter of 2009–10 a community survey conducted by the government found that one in 12 locals fell through thinning ice in Nunatsiavut, and more than half of the residents could not travel across the ice to collect wood to heat their homes.

Sea ice has been a leading protagonist in shaping the lives and culture of the Inuit, and understanding it has been a skill passed down from generation to generation. “Initially, my community was very concerned about the SmartIce project,” says Arreak, noting that they were apprehensive to replace their traditional wisdom with technology. “So I started listening to them and asked how they would like me to work on the project.”

The feedback helped inform the current iteration of the project, which uses sensors stored in floatable plastic tubes that monitor danger zones identified through community feedback. Data is then collected via electromagnetic waves in the ice, producing an accurate reading of its thickness. The beauty lies in the simplicity of the gadget, which visualizes data through user-friendly maps where orange means “caution” and red means “stop.”

Besides Pond Inlet, SmartIce is being piloted in Nain, Labrador. For their work so far, Arreak and his team were recognized with an Arctic Inspiration Award, the “Nobel of the North,” which came with a $400,000 prize.

“It’s good to see the community embrace SmartIce,” says Arreak, who emphasizes the importance of community ownership over the development and implementation of the technology. “We can go back to predicting ice conditions better, and making life safer.”

Louisiana (USA). May 6th, 2010. Aerial view of the oil leaked from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead, the BP leased oil platform exploded April 20 and sank after burning. The picture was taken in the vicinity where the platform sank from an altitude of 3200 ft. Photo by Greenpeace USA 2010.

Even as the Deepwater Horizon spill releases an estimated 25,000 barrels of crude oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico—making it, in some experts’ estimates, an even greater ecological disaster then 1989 Exxon Valdez spill—Chevron Canada Ltd. is pursuing plans to create one of the deepest offshore oil wells in the world off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.  While President Obama and California’s Governor Schwarzenegger have passed a moratorium on offshore drilling in the U.S. in response to the Gulf explosion and the Canadian National Energy Board has announced a review of arctic safety and environmental offshore drilling requirements for the Canadian north, Chevron is preparing to drill 2.6 kilometers under water in the Canadian Atlantic—nearly 1 kilometer deeper then the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico.  The Chevron drill ship Stena Carron will be drilling in the Orphan Basin in the North Atlantic, 430 kilometers northeast of St. John’s; and while many have raised concerns about the dangers of another possible leak, the federal and provincial governments are doing their best to assuage those fears and press on with the project unchanged.

In a debate before the provincial legislature, Newfoundland and Labrador’s NDP leader Lorraine Michail voiced her concern: “Why won’t they put a halt to this project until we know how to deal with incidents so far beneath the ocean?” she asked, referencing BP’s inability to deal with the ongoing spill in the Gulf and their slow reaction time in drilling a relief well.  In response, the province’s natural resources minister Kathy Dunderdale has defended the project, asserting that unlike the Deepwater Horizon ship, the Stena Carron is equipped with three backup systems; “we have a degree of security—as much as one can rely on—that the proper measures and countermeasures are in place,” she said.

While the federal government is assuring those concerned that our safeguards are tougher than those in place south of the border, some analysts worry that Chevron’s backup plans are not designed for this new class of superdeep well. Ian Doig, an oil industry expert, commented to the Globe and Mail that only two rigs are located near enough to the Orphan Basin to be of any help in case of a spill, but that neither of those rigs are equipped to drill relief wells in the depths proposed. “If Chevron gets into problems at the total depth of its proposed well, neither of those two rigs in the area have the capability of going down to that depth […] They’ll just have to stand back and watch,” Doig said.

If Canada’s intractability comes as any surprise to you, it shouldn’t. I only have to point you to George Monbiot’s condemnatory Guardian article accusing Canada of representing the single largest impediment to positive environmental change on the global scale or to Zoe Cormier’s postcard from London last September in which she documents Canada’s place as public enemy number one for many environmental groups.  The reluctance or inability of our government to enforce greater accountability on the oil industry is merely the latest manifestation of an attitude that has spawned the ecological disaster of the tar sands, the world’s dirtiest oil project and the largest single industrial source of carbon emissions.

While Chevron has assured the government that the project is as safe as it can be, the question must be asked: how much of the environment is our government willing to sacrifice for the economy?

One of the options the C.D. Howe Institute sees to avoid a major hit to the workforce as the Atlantic Provinces's populations age is to discourage early retirement and to offer incentives to working longer like allowing RRSP contributions later in life.

We’ll all get older, and start to slow down. It’s just a fact of life. But in the Atlantic Provinces, the population as a whole is getting older, and that’s going to lead to tough times ahead unless the provincial and federal governments step-in and make some changes.

A report released Monday by the C.D. Howe Institute says the region could face a shrinking workforce as soon as next year. As the baby boomers retire, the old-age dependency ratio (people aged 65 and over relative to the working-age population) is rising. This, coupled with low birthrates, high out-migration, and a declining workforce means there will be more people using public programs, like health care, than paying in to them.

Young people grow up, go to school and leave the Atlantic provinces in droves. I know this because I’m one of them. I lasted longer than some of my friends, and only headed West, earlier this year. A lack of meaningful employment and proliferation of low-paying jobs sent me packing.

Most of the people I graduated from high-school with also left within a few years. We didn’t stay at home to work, pay provincial and municipal taxes, or buy homes. Our children won’t be attending publicly funded schools so there’s a savings, but it’s really nothing compared to the rising health care costs as the population ages.

This poses the question: if there were no jobs for those of us born in the Atlantic Provinces, why would anyone want to move there from the rest of the country or abroad? According to the Howe Institute’s report, they don’t. In the last 25 years, out-migration has topped in-migration consistently, with the exception of  2007 when the two were almost equal.

The Howe Institute has suggestions to avoid a future where the Atlantic provinces are trapped under an enormous tax-burden caused by too few workers and too many people seeking health care and government pensions. They include motivating people to retire later by changing tax laws on pensions and RRSPs, prefunding pharmacare programs, and attracting more immigrants with the Provincial Nominee Program.

Aside from the PNP, these options sound like possible temporary fixes — they won’t change the fact that people will retire eventually, and there has to be someone there to take up their job when that happens. The real solution is to offer the remaining young people a way to build a life for themselves in the Maritimes, instead of heading for Toronto  or Fort McMurray.

[Image by kiringqueen. Used under Creative Commons]