After Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, successive provincial governments concluded that services could not be delivered to hundreds of small, often island, fishing settlements, and offered payments to households that agreed to move to designated centres. Under the centralization programme from 1954 the whole community had to agree, and payments began at 150 dollars a family, rising to 600; under the federal-provincial programme from 1965 the threshold was lowered to 90 and then 80 per cent of households, and assistance rose to 1,000 dollars a family plus 200 per dependant and moving costs. Houses were often floated across bays to the new sites. Supporters described the scheme as a rational response to the decline of the inshore fishery; critics, including many of those moved, argued that the consent thresholds coerced dissenting households, that promised employment in the growth centres frequently did not materialise, and that communities and fishing rights were destroyed. It is generally described as one of the most controversial programmes in post-Confederation Newfoundland, and it remains a live subject in the province, where a smaller relocation scheme with a high consent threshold continues to operate.
The Newfoundland provincial government, later with Ottawa, paid and pressed outport communities to abandon their settlements and move to designated growth centres
The 1956 census counted about 415,000 people in the province, most of them in several hundred small outport communities along the coast; roughly 300 settlements were abandoned under the 1954 provincial and 1965 federal-provincial resettlement programmes.
There was no significant death toll. The programme moved people by agreement backed by financial inducement and the withdrawal of services, without violence; its costs were economic, social and cultural.
St. Pierre and Miquelon, Canada