August 2026 - St. John's Newfoundland and Labrador
LINKS
August 20 - 26 St. John's NL
We thoroughly enjoyed this trip to St. John's, it made a bid difference flying there. We had driven in 2022 and that had been a month long trip. This was 6 nights.
We flew Air Canada with no issues or delays either way.
We stayed at the Hilton Doubletree on Hill O'Chips which meant a steep climb upwards to anywhere! Even going down to Water St. meant a steep decline.
RESETTLEMENT PROGRAM
During Joey Smallwood’s controversial Resettlement Program in the 1950s and 60s, the provincial government paid families a small subsidy to abandon their isolated outport communities and move to larger "growth centers." Smallwood’s goal was to centralize the population to provide electricity, schools, and roads, famously telling residents they had to "resettle or rust."
Because the cash payout was tiny—often just $400 to $600 per family—it wasn't enough to buy or build a new home in a new town. To survive, resourceful Newfoundlanders decided to take their houses with them. This is the story of how outport families, anchored by fierce matriarchs, literally floated their homes across the ocean.
The Decision at Pushthrough
The wind off the South Coast was biting the day Martha Croft stood on her porch in Pushthrough, Fortune Bay. Joey Smallwood’s men had been through the community a month prior. They told the town that the school was closing, the coastal boat would no longer stop, and the doctor wasn't coming back. Ninety percent of the community had signed the paper agreeing to leave.
Martha’s husband, Thomas, wanted to take the government check, move to Fortune, and look for work at the deep-water fish plant. But Martha refused to leave her home behind. It was a sturdy, two-story saltbox house with thick spruce beams, built by Thomas and her father when they were wed.
"We aren't leaving the house to rot or be burned for firewood, Thomas," Martha said, her voice cutting through the rattle of the woodstove. "If Joey Smallwood wants us across the bay, he’s getting the house too."
Preparing for the Launch
The logistics of floating a house were terrifying. First, the men of the community gathered. In the outports, resettlement wasn't an individual task; it required the muscle of the entire village.
Thomas and his neighbors used hand jacks to lift the entire two-story saltbox off its stone foundation. They slid massive, freshly cut spruce logs beneath the floor joists. At low tide, they rolled the house down the rocky beach and into the freezing waters of the Atlantic.
Waiting in the harbor were dozens of empty, sealed oil drums and heavy cork-lined fish stages that the men lashed to the bottom timbers for buoyancy. The house sat low in the water, the dark green ocean lapping against the lower clapboards of Martha’s kitchen.
The Voyage Across the Bay
Two small, wooden fishing boats—local "make-and-break" trap skiffs—tied onto the house with thick hemp lines.
Martha refused to watch from the shore. As the boats fired up their single-cylinder engines, chugging a steady thump-thump-thump, Martha climbed through the front window and sat inside her own floating living room. Her chinaware was packed in flour sacks, and her kitchen table was lashed to the wall studs, but she sat right there on a wooden crate as her home drifted out into the open bay.
From the deck of the towing boats, the sight was surreal. A full, white-trimmed house was sailing past the rugged cliffs of Newfoundland, smoke still faintly drifting from the chimney pipe from the morning's dying embers.
Halfway across the bay, a sudden squall rolled in from the North Atlantic. The waves grew choppy, slamming against the side of the house. Inside, Martha could hear the old timbers groaning against the pressure of the sea. The house listed hard to the left, water seeping across the linoleum floor. For an hour, it was a battle between the small engines of the fishing boats and the rising tide. The men yelled over the wind, tightening the guide ropes to keep the structure from capsizing into the deep ocean trench.
Grounding on the New Shore
Just before dusk, the storm broke, and the two skiffs successfully guided the floating saltbox into the calm harbor of their assigned resettlement town.As the tide went out, the house settled onto the new, unfamiliar beach. The neighbors from the new town were already waiting on the shore with ropes, winches, and teams of horses to help pull the structure up the banks onto its new hillside plot.
Martha climbed out of the front door onto the wet sand. Her home was damp, a few window panes were shattered, and salt crust lined the siding—but it was whole. She looked back across the gray water toward the ghost town they had left behind. Smallwood had taken their community, but he hadn't taken her home.
SALT AND BISCUIT HOUSES
The term "saltbox houses" (often affectionately paired with stories of eating hardtack biscuits) refers to the iconic, structural style of the historic homes that families floated across the bays during the resettlement era.Here is the breakdown of why these classic homes were built that way, and how they got their unique names:
The Saltbox House (The Architecture)
The Name Origin: The shape perfectly mimicked the wooden, lidded boxes used to store expensive rock salt in 19th-century kitchens.
The Design Genius: This shape was highly functional for Newfoundland's brutal winters. Farmers and fishers positioned the long, low-sloping back roof to face north into the prevailing winter winds. This deflected the heavy gale-force winds and shed massive snowfall loads right off the back of the house, protecting the structural integrity of the home.
The "Biscuits" (The Resettlement Diet)
When locals tell stories of moving these houses, they often mention Purity Hardtack or Pilot Biscuits. These weren't parts of the house, but they were the fuel that kept the workers alive during the gruelling process of jacking up and floating a home.
Hardtack is a simple, rock-hard biscuit made of flour, water, and salt. It was originally baked by local companies like Purity Factories to supply fishermen going out on months-long voyages because it never spoiled.
To move a house, teams of men worked for days in the freezing ocean water. Their primary fuel was mugs of hot molasses tea and hardtack biscuits that had to be soaked in water or fried in pork fat ("fish and brewis") just to make them soft enough to bite without breaking a tooth.
Why They Survived the Floating Trips
The reason these "saltbox" homes were able to survive being rolled into the ocean and towed by tiny fishing boats comes down to how they were constructed. They were built using traditional timber framing with thick, hand-hewn spruce and fir logs joined together by wooden pegs rather than cheap iron nails. This gave the houses a natural flexibility, allowing the structures to bend and twist with the ocean waves without snapping or collapsing into the sea.
THE COD MORATORIUM
I am separating this from the Fishing section below because of its importance.
The 1992 Atlantic cod moratorium was the largest industrial layoff in Canadian history and a defining economic and cultural catastrophe for Newfoundland and Labrador. On July 2, 1992, the federal government announced an immediate, total ban on fishing northern cod to save the species from total collapse.
In an instant, over 30,000 fishers and plant workers lost their jobs, and a way of life that had sustained the island for 500 years disappeared overnight.
The Causes: How the Fish Vanished
For centuries, Newfoundlanders fished using traditional inshore methods (handlines, traps) that harvested cod sustainably. The collapse was driven by a shift to aggressive, industrialized global fishing:
Foreign Factory Trawlers: In the 1950s and 60s, massive corporate factory ships from Europe arrived on the Grand Banks. They used giant bottom-trawling nets that scraped the ocean floor, scooping up millions of tonnes of fish, including spawning populations.
Overfishing & Corporate Greed: Even after Canada extended its ocean border to 200 nautical miles in 1977 to push foreign ships out, Canadian companies bought their own massive trawler fleets. They continued overfishing at unsustainable rates.
Bad Science: Government scientists at Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) used flawed mathematical models. They vastly overestimated how much cod was left in the ocean, ignoring warning signs from local, independent inshore fishers who reported that their traps were coming up completely empty.
The Announcement: "The Day the Music Died"
By 1992, the northern cod biomass had plummeted by a staggering 99% from its historical peaks. On July 1, 1992, federal Fisheries Minister John Crosbie travelled to St. John's to address the crisis. Confronted by an angry crowd of fishers who knew their livelihoods were in jeopardy, Crosbie famously yelled out, "I didn't put the fish in the goddamn water!"
The very next day, July 2, the formal moratorium was declared. It was originally supposed to last just two years.
The Devastating Impact
The social and economic fallout shaped modern Newfoundland:
The Ghost Towns: Hundreds of small outport communities ("around the bay") relied 100% on local fish plants. When the plants shut down, these communities lost their entire economies.
Mass Exodus: An unprecedented wave of migration began. Roughly 60,000 people left the province over the next decade, with thousands of young families moving down the highway to Ontario or out to the Alberta oil fields. The province’s population has never fully recovered.
The Compensation Package: The federal government launched emergency aid programs (like NCARP and TAGS) to pay fishers to stay home or retrain for other jobs. While it kept people from starving, it stripped generations of workers of their cultural identity.
The moratorium lasted for over three decades. The cod population proved incredibly slow to recover, hampered by cold water temperatures, lack of food (like capelin), and seals.
In June 2024, the federal government officially announced the end of the 32-year moratorium for the northern cod stock, reopening a modest, strictly managed commercial fishery. However, the decision remains highly controversial, with many local fishers and scientists arguing that the stock is still too fragile to handle large-scale corporate harvesting again.
COSTCO
It is the largest Costco warehouse in Canada. It relocated from the east end to the west end of the city in June 2019.
Moving to the west end significantly benefits out-of-town shoppers and residents coming from remote or rural towns across Newfoundland. Because this is the only Costco in the entire province, people routinely drive several hours from "around the bay" and central/western Newfoundland just to stock up.
Like most Costco locations worldwide, the single item sold in the highest volume by sheer unit count is Kirkland Signature Bath Tissue (toilet paper). Globally and across Canada, Costco sells over a billion rolls of toilet paper every year.
In coastal, rural, or northern towns "around the bay," produce prices are notoriously astronomical. It is not uncommon for a single, wilted head of iceberg or romaine lettuce to cost $8.00 to $10.00 at a small, remote community grocery store.
The math behind why rural shoppers make the long drive to the St. John's Costco comes down to a few major factors:
Massive Price Discrepancies: While a remote local store might charge up to $10.00 for just one or two heads of lettuce, Costco sells a massive 6-pack of fresh romaine hearts for roughly $7.50 to $8.50. Rural shoppers are essentially getting six times the food for the exact same price.
The "Freshness" Tax: Because produce has to travel by boat or long transport truck routes to reach outlying communities, it sits in transit for days. Outport residents often joke that they are paying a "luxury tax" for brown, day-old vegetables. Costco's massive inventory turnover means their produce is much fresher and lasts longer once it's brought home.
Fuel vs. Food Offsets: Even with the cost of a $60+ gas tank to drive 3 hours to St. John's, a rural family easily breaks even—and saves hundreds of dollars—just by bulk-buying their fresh produce, dairy, meat, and non-perishables in a single run rather than shopping locally.
Shoppers even make the trip from Saint-Pierre and Miquelon—the tiny French island territory located just off the coast of Newfoundland—to shop at the St. John's Costco!
Even though they live in a territory of France, their unique geographic isolation makes St. John's their closest major retail hub. The trip has become a well-known regional phenomenon:
How the Shopping Trips Work
The Transit Route: Residents from Saint-Pierre either take a short 45-minute flight via Air Saint-Pierre directly into St. John's, or they take the passenger ferry to Fortune, NL, and drive roughly four hours to the metro area.
Bulk Grocery Runs: Because Saint-Pierre relies heavily on expensive supply shipments arriving by boat from France or mainland Canada, grocery costs at home are very high. Families and small business owners will travel to St. John's specifically to load up on bulk items, household goods, electronics, and non-perishables.
The "Customs" Factor: Because they are entering a different country, they have to go through international customs when returning home to France. This means they face strict limitations on how much meat, dairy, alcohol, and tobacco they can bring back, but dry goods and household supplies fly through.
The move to the west end of St. John's actually benefited the Saint-Pierre travelers who choose to take the ferry route. For those driving up from the Fortune ferry terminal, they hit the Galway neighborhood immediately upon entering the St. John's area via the highway, cutting out the stressful cross-town city driving that was previously required to reach the old east-end store.
SAND/SALT
This pile of sand was at the harbour outside our hotel.
When it comes to winter street management, the City of St. John's primarily relies on pure road salt rather than sand. However, the city maintains a critical supply of winter sand to mix with salt when temperatures plummet below -10°C (where salt loses its effectiveness) or during severe supply shortages.
Because St. John's is plagued by an average of over 360 centimetres of snow every winter, its de-icing operations are massive:
The Normal Salt Target: St. John's typically burns through 30,000 to 40,000+ tonnes of pure road salt in a single winter season. During severe winters, that number stretches past 41,390 tonnes, routinely breaking city records.
The Sand Usage: Sand is used in much lower ratios compared to other provinces. Under normal conditions, the city mixes small amounts of sand to provide traction on steep hills. However, during extreme winter emergencies—such as the massive winter supply crunch when the city's marine salt provider completely ran out of product—the city quickly shifts to spreading a heavy salt-and-sand mixture across its 1,400 lane kilometres of road to stretch the remaining supply.
The Primary Road Salt Pile: Every summer and fall, massive cargo ships pull right into the St. John's Harbour and unload colossal, open-air mountains of rock salt onto Harvey’s Wharf. The majority of this salt is shipped directly from the Magdalen Islands (Îles de la Madeleine) located in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
The Winter Sand: The sand used by the city is sourced locally from quarries right on the Avalon Peninsula. The city contracts local aggregate suppliers to provide coarse, washed winter sand (usually 9mm or smaller grid sizes) blended with a small ratio of salt to prevent the sand piles from freezing into solid blocks inside the city trucks.
Disposing of 141.7 inches of salty, dirty street snow in St. John's involves navigating strict municipal bylaws and a complex, decades-long debate over federal environmental laws.
The Municipal Rules (No Private Street Dumping)For everyday residents and private plow operators, the city rules are extremely strict:
The Street Ban: Under City of St. John's By-Law 1098, it is strictly illegal to shovel, blow, or plow snow onto any city-cleared street or sidewalk.
The Fines: The city fiercely protects its traffic grids. Shoveling snow back into the road can land residents or private companies with a fine of up to $5,000, and the city can bill the offender for the cost of bringing out a crew to remove it.
The Property Rule: Private property owners and commercial snow-clearing contractors must pile and melt snow strictly on their own premises or pay to haul it away to an officially approved land sites.
The Harbour Loophole (The Environmental Controversy)
When the city does mass "snow widening" operations downtown, fleets of dump trucks gather thousands of tonnes of snow. Historically, the city has dumped this snow directly into the St. John's Harbour. This creates a massive legal and ecological dilemma:
The Federal Law: Under Canada’s federal Fisheries Act, dumping street snow into fish-bearing waters is a violation. Street snow isn't clean—it is a toxic cocktail of road salt, heavy metals, motor oil, and plastic debris scraped off the asphalt.
The Reality: Despite violating federal environmental principles, St. John's has continued the practice during major winter emergencies. The city has repeatedly argued that hauling tens of thousands of tonnes of snow to inland melting facilities is too expensive, logistically impossible with the city's terrain, and would clog up the city's narrow streets with continuous dump truck traffic
FISHING
Recreational fishing rules for individuals in Newfoundland and Labrador depend entirely on what species you are targeting, whether you are a resident, and whether you are fishing in inland (freshwater) or coastal (saltwater) waters.
1. Ocean Cod & Groundfish (The "Food Fishery")For the highly popular recreational groundfish fishery (which includes Atlantic Cod), rules dictate that:
No Licence Required: You do not need a licence or tags to participate. It is open to both residents and non-residents.
Individual Catch Limit: An individual is limited to catching 5 groundfish per day (including cod).
No Wasting/High-Grading: You are forbidden from throwing smaller cod back to keep larger ones (high-grading). You may bleed and gut fish at sea, but you cannot skin or fillet them until you are back on land so fisheries officers can verify the species and count.
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Time Limitations: For safety reasons, you can only fish from one hour before sunrise to one hour after sunset.
Atlantic Salmon (Highly Regulated)
Freshwater salmon angling is fiercely protected and requires strict adherence to the DFO Anglers' Guide:
Licence & Tags Required: Everyone (both residents and non-residents) must purchase a salmon angling licence, which comes with physical, color-coded plastic gill tags. Non-residents are also legally required to hire a licensed local guide to fish designated salmon rivers.
Retention Limits: Anglers can keep a total of two salmon per season, with a maximum of one salmon taken from a Class 2 river. Keeping salmon is completely banned on Class 0 rivers or unscheduled waters.
Catch and Release: There is a strict catch-and-release limit of three salmon per day (reduced to two per day on Class 0 rivers).
For individuals looking to catch their own dinner, the rules for lobster in Newfoundland and Labrador are incredibly simple, but probably not the answer you want to hear: recreational lobster fishing is completely illegal!
Which leads me to lobster rolls. Anytime we are in the Maritimes it drives me crazy that I can get one cheaper in Toronto, I know, I know the meat is frozen, however...
It feels completely backwards that a sandwich would cost more at the source than it does a thousand kilometres away, but it is a very common consumer frustration. You will routinely pay $30 to $45+ for a lobster roll in the Maritimes, while certain spots in Toronto sell them for $22 to $30.
Fresh vs. Frozen (The Quality Difference)
The biggest differentiator is the meat itself.In the Maritimes: You are usually paying for fresh, never-frozen lobster meat. Processing fresh lobster is incredibly labor-intensive; a worker has to hand-shuck the claws, knuckles, and tails of cooked lobsters daily. Freshly picked claw and knuckle meat commands a heavy premium.
In Toronto: Unless you are at a high-end seafood establishment, many casual Toronto spots use frozen, pre-shucked, vacuum-sealed claw and knuckle meat imported in massive bulk blocks. Freezing slightly alters the texture but drastically lowers the cost of the raw product and cuts kitchen labor down to zero.
Global Export Dynamics
Lobster is a global commodity, and local restaurants have to compete with international buyers.Maritime processors can make far more money flash-freezing whole lobsters and shipping them to high-end markets in Europe, Asia, and the United States than they can selling them cheap to the diner down the street.
Because local restaurants must pay competitive global market rates to secure the product from processors, those historic high wharf prices are passed directly to the consumer.
The "Tourist Premium"
In the Maritimes, a lobster roll isn’t just a sandwich; it’s an experiential tourist bucket-list item. Seasonal shacks in hotspots like Peggy's Cove, Cavendish, or the Halifax Waterfront only have a short window (roughly June to September) to make their entire year's profit. They price their menus knowing that travelers who just arrived from Ontario or the U.S. are emotionally prepared to pay a premium for an "authentic" coastal meal.
In contrast, Toronto restaurants operate year-round and treat lobster rolls as a standard menu item that has to compete with thousands of other local lunch options, keeping their margins tighter to attract repeat local office workers.
Supply Chain Subsidies
Large grocery chains and massive seafood distributors based in Ontario buy lobster in such astronomical quantities that they secure volume discounts a small coastal shack in New Brunswick or P.E.I. could never dream of. Ironically, it is sometimes cheaper for a massive distributor to move a truckload of lobster to a central warehouse in Toronto than it is for a local purveyor to distribute small batches to rural tourist communities across the East Coast.
FARMING
There is farming in Newfoundland and Labrador, though it looks very different from the vast grain fields of Western Canada. Because the province is covered in rugged rock, muskeg, and acidic soil, only about 0.1% of the province's land is suitable for agriculture. Despite these challenges, local farmers produce roughly $140+ million in agricultural sales annually, focusing heavily on products that thrive in cool, damp climates.
What Newfoundland Farms Produce Best
Dairy, Eggs, and Poultry: Supply-managed commodities make up the vast majority of NL's agricultural revenue. The province is completely self-sufficient in fluid milk and egg production, with massive dairy farms operating in the Goulds.
Root Vegetables: Newfoundland's cool climate and rocky soil are perfectly suited for "Jigger's Dinner" staples. Local farms produce massive yields of potatoes, turnips (rutabagas), carrots, and cabbage.
Berries & Cranberries: The province has a massive commercial cranberry industry, alongside cultivated fields of strawberries, raspberries, and native wild berries like partridgeberries and bakeberries.
Sod & Greenhouse Operations: Because of the short growing season, massive commercial greenhouse operations thrive across the island, providing bedding plants, flowers, and hydroponic greens.
The "Food Security" Push
Because Newfoundland imports roughly 90% of its fresh food via the Marine Atlantic ferry, the province is incredibly vulnerable to supply chain disruptions (like storms or ferry breakdowns).In response, the provincial government has been aggressively clearing land and giving out grants to double the province's food self-sufficiency. This includes expanding large-scale vegetable storage facilities so local potatoes and turnips can last on grocery shelves all winter long.
HARBOUR
St. John's Harbour is a naturally sheltered, ice-free deep-water port on the east coast of Newfoundland, acting as the economic and historic heart of the provincial capital. [1, 2]The Narrows
The entrance: Connected to the Atlantic Ocean by a dramatic, steep-walled channel called The Narrows, which is about 61 meters (200 feet) wide at its narrowest point.
Navigation: Sailors call entering the harbor "threading the eye of the needle" because of the tight passage and strong currents.
Defense: Signal Hill and Fort Amherst guard the north and south sides of this entrance, holding centuries of military history.
Economy and Operations
Managed by: Run by the St. John's Port Authority, it serves as a crucial hub for the region.
Industries: It handles container shipping, offshore oil and gas industry supplies, commercial fishing, marine repairs, and cruise ship visits.
Shelter: The basin stays calm and ice-free during harsh North Atlantic winters, making it a safe haven for ships.
History and Culture
Early wealth: The port drove the historic salt cod fishery that built the early town.
Lifeline: For centuries before modern highways and air travel, the harbor served as Newfoundland's primary link to the rest of the world.
Waterfront: Downtown streets like Water Street run alongside the port, featuring old merchant buildings, parks like Harbourside Park, and views of colorful hillside houses.
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