The Quebec Federation of Municipalities (FQM) and the Government of Quebec are aware that it will be necessary to work to counter the devitalization of villages.
“We know that gas stations, convenience stores and small grocery stores in the villages have closed,” said Jacques Demers, president of the FQM and mayor of Sainte-Catherine-de-Hatley, a municipality located between Magog and Sherbrooke.
“Devitalization is really a file that we try to defend,” he adds.
The proportion of municipalities with less than 1,000 inhabitants that do not have retail buildings has indeed increased between 2006 and 2021, according to the Institut de la statistique du Québec.
In 2021, 95 municipalities were affected by this devitalization phenomenon, compared to 55 in 2006.
Photo provided by the FQM
Jacques Demers, president of the FMQ.
DISAPPEARANCE OF SERVICES
“We’ve been talking regarding it for years, we know that these services, once they leave, they don’t come back,” added Mr. Demers, telling himself that the growth of supermarkets in the largest neighboring cities explains this devitalization.
“Everyone started moving and going to these places, so you no longer stop in your village or the neighboring village where you used to go get your local shopping” , explained Mr. Demers.
$470 M TO HELP VILLAGES
For his part, last September, during the election campaign, François Legault announced his intention to invest $470 million to help the villages of Quebec provide local services. “We want our regions to be inhabited, we want to protect the history of our villages and we want to protect this sense of belonging to one’s community,” said the Premier.
“Purchasing in the hearts of villages in Quebec has been in decline for several years, in favor of web giants and supermarkets,” he added. To help the regions, the Regions and Rurality Fund (FRR) has already been in place since April 2020, with an envelope totaling nearly $1.3 billion until 2024, including $250 million for 2022.
“Rarely in the past have we helped restaurants and small businesses because they did not agree in the subsidy formulas,” comments Mr. Demers.
Preserving 110 years of vitality thanks to a cooperative
A multifunctional general store that was from 1908 to 2018 the heart of La Visitation-de-l’Île-Dupas, a small village located near Berthierville, will live once more, this time in the form of a cooperative.
In September 2020, Rémi Courchesne and his spouse, Marie-Pier Aubuchon, purchased the 2,300 square foot building of this store, which was first owned by Mr. Courchesne’s great-grandparents.
The place was a general store with a gas station, over time housing a post office, a hardware store, a credit union, a grocery store (the only one in the village) and a butcher-abattoir.
“The first television in the village was here at the time, people came to watch television here, there are many stories in this building,” said Rémi Courchesne, whose father, uncle and grandfather have also run the place for much of their lives.
SUPERMARKET FASHION
But, at the end of the 1990s, the big supermarket banners arrived in Berthierville, which changed the situation for the small municipality of 600 souls.
“The grocery side was less competitive, the clientele went down, but people kept coming to shop for the meat; the sausage was very well known, said Rémi Courchesne. It used to be a fashion to go grocery shopping in town, but I think now people are going back to neighborhood grocery stores.”
His father and uncle therefore stopped everything in 2018, when their age also began to play into the equation.
A NEARBY MARKET
Then, two residents of La Visitation-de-l’Île-Dupas, Karine Valois and Marie-Pierre Beauséjour, agreed with the new owners to make it a coop.
The idea of a local market with local products with eco-responsible and organic value was finally retained. There will also be a cafe that will serve meals.
“We do this out of interest because we want this place to stay alive and to be a unifier for the community,” underlines Ms. Beauséjour.
Marie-Pier Aubuchon, the spouse of Rémi Courchesne, who was mayor of the village from 2017 to 2021, mentioned that “at the municipality, we were also looking for initiatives to counter devitalization”.
