The Federation of Quebec Municipalities (FQM) and the Quebec government recognize the need to address village devitalization.
“We know that petrol stations, convenience stores and small grocery stores have closed in the villages,” said Jacques Demers, president of FQM and mayor of Sainte-Catherine-de-Hatley, a commune between Magog and Sherbrooke.
“Devitalization is really an act that we’re trying to defend,” he adds.
The proportion of communities with fewer than 1,000 residents that do not have retail buildings actually increased between 2006 and 2021, according to the Institut de la statistique du Québec.
In 2021, 95 communities 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 about this for years, we know that once these services are gone they don’t come back,” added Mr Demers, telling himself that the growth of supermarkets in the largest neighboring cities explains this devitalisation.
“Everyone started moving and going to these places, so you don’t stop in your village or the neighboring village where you used to do your shopping,” explained Mr. Demers.
470 MILLION USD TO SUPPORT VILLAGES
For his part, François Legault announced last September, during the election campaign, his intention to invest $470 million to help Quebec’s villages provide local services. “We want our regions to be inhabited, we want to protect the history of our villages and we want to preserve this sense of belonging to our own community,” said the Prime Minister.
“Shopping in the heart of Quebec’s villages has been declining for several years in favor of internet giants and supermarkets,” he added. To help the regions, the Regions and Rurality Fund (FRR) has been in existence since April 2020, with a total of almost USD 1.3 billion until 2024, of which USD 250 million is for 2022.
“In the past we have rarely supported restaurants and small businesses because they disagreed with the funding formulas,” comments Mr. Demers.
110 years of liveliness preserved thanks to a cooperative
A multifunctional general store that was the heart of La Visitation-de-l’Île-Dupas, a small village near Berthierville, from 1908 to 2018 is being revived this time in the form of a cooperative.
In September 2020, Rémi Courchesne and his wife Marie-Pier Aubuchon acquired the 2,300 square meter building of this shop, which initially belonged to Mr Courchesne’s great-grandparents.
The site was a general store with a gas station and over time housed a post office, hardware store, credit union, grocery store (the only one in the village) and a butcher’s slaughterhouse.
“The first TV in the village was here back then, people came here to watch TV, there are many stories in this building,” said Rémi Courchesne, whose father, uncle and grandfather also lived in the place for much of their life.
SUPERMARKET FASHION
But in the late 1990s, large supermarket banners arrived in Berthierville, changing the situation for the small community of 600 people.
“The grocery side was less competitive, customers were falling, but people kept coming back to buy meat; The sausage is very well known, said Rémi Courchesne. It used to be the fashion to shop for groceries in town, but I think now people are going back to the neighborhood grocery stores.”
So his father and uncle stopped everything in 2018 when their age started to play into the equation.
A MARKET NEARBY
Then two residents of La Visitation-de-l’Île-Dupas, Karine Valois and Marie-Pierre Beauséjour, agreed with the new owners to turn it into a cooperative.
Finally, the idea of a local market with local products with eco-responsible and biological value was maintained. There will also be a cafe serving meals.
“We are doing this out of interest, because we want this place to stay alive and be a unifier for the community,” stresses Ms. Beauséjour.
Marie-Pier Aubuchon, wife of Rémi Courchesne, mayor of the village from 2017 to 2021, mentioned that “in the community we have also looked for initiatives to counteract devitalization”.