 |
|
|
Home  Virtual Exhibits Resettlement Documents Smallwood Statement, Feb. 1957
Smallwood Statement, Feb. 1957
Statement Image Page 1 (101k)
Statement Image Page 2 (101k)
Statement Image Page 3 (31k)
14 February, 1957
Premier Smallwood issued the following statement
today:
"For some years past there has been a lot of talk about
the way the population of Newfoundland are scattered into so
many hundreds of settlements along so many thousands of miles
of coastline. It has long been felt by thoughtful people
that the terribly scattered nature of our population has made
it very expensive for the Government to provide public
services to all the people, such as post offices, telegraph
offices, telephones, coastal boats, hospitals, roads, snow
clearing, schools and many other services. Many people have
felt that there are hundreds of settlements more than there
should be, and this feeling has been expressed by a great many
people in recent years.
"I have given this matter a great deal of thought and
at a recent meeting of the Cabinet I raised the subject for
the consideration of my Colleagues. It was agreed by all that this
matter should be taken hold of with determination by the Government
in an effort to see what, if anything, can be done to bring about
a remedy. The one thing that we will not do is to force anybody
to move. That would be dictatorship and it is useless for
anyone to suggest that we should force people to do that. On
the other hand we all feel that the Government have perhaps not
been spending enough money each year to help people to move from
smaller settlements into larger ones. The help we have been
giving has been running up to about four hundred dollars per
family. A fair number of people have accepted this assistance
and have moved to larger settlements, but it would take the next
fifty years, at this rate, for any really considerable number of
settlements to close down.
- 2 -
"I asked my Colleagues to agree to the appointment of
a special sub-committee of the Cabinet to organize a special
investigation of this whole matter, and they heartily agreed.
The special sub-committee are Honourables Beaten J. Abbott,
Chairman; Samuel J. Hefferton, Dr. Fred W. Rowe, and Dr. James
M. McGrath. They are the Ministers responsible for the
administration of Public Welfare, Municipal Affairs, Education,
and Public Health.
"This sub-committee of Cabinet are to report back to the
Cabinet on the nature of the investigation that should be made by
the Government as a whole, for the purpose of finding out how
many settlements there are containing small numbers of families,
the names of the larger settlements to which such families might
wish to move, whether enough land and other conveniences are to
be found in such larger places, whether by moving to such larger
places people would still be as well able to make a living as
before, whether sufficient school and church accommodation already
exists in such larger places for the newcomers who would arrive
from the smaller places, and a considerble [sic] number of other factors
that would need to be known before an actual program could be
formulated. The sub-committee of the Cabinet are expected to
make proposals on these points to the Cabinet within the next
few weeks.
"We all feel that the number of small settlements that
might disappear in the next few years runs as high perhaps as
two hundred or even more. There might be as many as ten thousand
families living in such small places at the present time. It
might cost millions of dollars to give them the financial assistance
they might need to encourage them to move to larger towns and
settlements. These are the facts that must be learned from an
- 3 -
organized survey, and my Colleagues agree that this survey
should be launched just as soon as the sub-committee of the
Cabinet report back to us."
<< Back
|
|
|
|
|
