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An outport is the term given for a small isolated coastal community in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Originally the term was just used for coastal communities on the island of Newfoundland but the term has also been adopted for those on the mainland area of Labrador as well.
Outports are some of the oldest communities in Canada to this day, many of them having been established by Portuguese, Spanish, Basque, French, and English fishermen and whalers in the 1500s-1800s.
The term has sometimes been used in a derogatory sense. On the island of Newfoundland, residents of the capital city of St. John's would frequently be referred to as townies, whereas those not from St. John's would be referred to as bay porters - derived from outport. This cultural phenomenon mostly existed in the days before reliable surface land transportation on the island, when most travel was done by boat or coastal ferry and settlements were located on the coast.
The railway construction in the 1890s resulted in the creation of inland communities that relied on land-based natural resources. The outports began to see wholesale depopulation following cutbacks to ferry services and construction of roads throughout the island during and after the Second World War. Following Confederation in 1949, the government of premier Joey Smallwood pursued a policy of forced/encouraged resettlement of residents from outports to central inland communities where provision of schools, health care and other government services could be achieved more cheaply.
The resettlement program had many critics as they noted it resulted in what was likened to a "cultural genocide" as rural Newfoundland society became decimated. The cod moratorium of 1990 was another blow to the outport communities, whose entire economies were based on the ocean and its resources. Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, outports have voluntarily agreed to depopulate as government required a 100% agreement among residents for resettlement, prior to agreeing to close a community. The provincial government still maintains a voluntary resettlement program whereby residents of outports agreeing to resettle are given lump-sum payments of approximately $100,000 (CAD).
Today, only a small proportion of the provincial population remain in outports along the rugged coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador. With no highway access, limited economic growth due to declines in the fishery, and ongoing depopulation as young people move to larger urban centres, the outport is an endangered phenomenon.
