ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — Just north of Lewisporte is the picturesque town of Birchy Bay. Sheltered from the Atlantic, with a large stand of birch and twin rivers running through, the area was paradise to the native Beothuk before settlers took over and set down stakes around 1800.
Now it’s home to a little more than 500 people. Every summer, that number grows a bit as former residents who moved to mainland Canada long ago return to summer homes to reconnect with family and take in familiar surroundings.
Cliff Luff is one of them. He and his wife built a house there last year so he could come back and visit his mother every year. That only happened one summer; his mother died in February of this year. But they have plenty of other family in the area.
Viola Eveleigh is another. She and her husband have a cosy house in the community that they return to every summer. They, too, have plenty of family and friends who they reconnect with every year.
But not this year.
Both Luff and Eveleigh were disappointed last month when the province put a ban on non-essential visitors in an effort to stop the importation of the coronavirus. Only essential workers and permanent residents were allowed.
That disappointment turned to anger, though, when they realized thousands of people were getting exemptions, some apparently just for weddings and ordinary family visits.
Not so for them, though — not even on appeal.
“It’s so frustrating,” Eveleigh said this week from her home in Brantford, Ont., “because if they said no to everyone, I would accept it and say, OK, and we’d go from there.”
“The only ones I know who are being denied are those with summer homes.”
— Viola Eveleigh
She was frustrated to hear Wednesday that more than 6,300 exemption requests have been approved.
“So, who are they?” she asked.
Both Premier Dwight Ball and Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Janice Fitzgerald insist these exemptions fall into limited categories, such as students and workers returning home and those retiring here or coming back to care for a loved one.
But Eveleigh says she has heard from a number of people who are merely coming back for a family visit, as they do every year.
“The only ones I know who are being denied are those with summer homes,” she said. “What’s that all about?”
Florida connection
Like hundreds of other retired Newfoundlanders — expatriate and otherwise — both Eveleigh and Luff go to Florida during the winter months. Eveleigh doesn’t understand how it’s any safer for permanent provincial residents to return than others.
“They go there and spend six months, but their primary residence is in Newfoundland, so they can all travel back and forth with no problem,” she said. “But because we have a primary residence in Ontario and go to Newfoundland in the summer, it’s a big issue for them. It doesn’t make sense.”
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Luff said he and his wife expect to sell their Brampton, Ont., home and move to Birchy Bay soon, but weren’t ready to do it yet — and weren’t ready to fudge that fact on their application form, either.
“I could have turned around and said, 'yeah, I’m moving back,' but I won’t do that.”
Luff says he’s not looking for loopholes, just fairness.
“I understand what they’re doing — I’m not naïve — that they need to keep the province safe,” he said.
He says he just doesn’t get why property owners are treated differently.
“Premier Ball seems to dig his heels in on that one issue, people who own properties, and I don’t understand it.”
Both Luff and Eveleigh have signed up for a class-action lawsuit against the ban, which is being launched by St. John’s lawyers Geoff Budden and Bob Buckingham.
Another lawsuit, launched by a woman who was initially refused entry to attend her mother’s funeral, was filed in court earlier in the month.
On Wednesday, Budden said there doesn’t seem to be any logical reason to single out those with summer residences for refusal.
“Relaxing the travel ban doesn’t mean you need to relax self-isolation and physical distancing or other things that are actually proven preventers of the spread of this terrible disease,” he said.
Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, P.E.I., Nunavut and Yukon are the only Canadian provinces and territories with travel bans. Last week, the Northwest Territories lifted a similar ban, with government officials saying it conflicted with Canadians’ mobility rights as protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
— With files from Tara Bradbury
Peter Jackson is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter covering health for The Telegram.
