Why No Walmarts in Gaspesie?
Posted in Personal Miscellany
on August 8th, 2010 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Travel
Mathieu and I recently did a complete circuit around the Gaspésie region of Québec for our vacation (see the photo gallery). As you can see, even with my less-than-professional photography, Gaspésie is a beautiful region and I highly recommend it. I have one question, though, and I'm still not convinced I have a good answer: why no Walmarts? I'm not saying that I'm sad about not seeing any Walmarts, just puzzled, because the population base seems to be there, compared to regions of New Brunswick with similar population levels which sport several Walmarts, and sucking the life out of little towns serving rural hinterlands like that is basically Walmart's modus operandi.
The region is very touristy, especially the area around the village of Percé. Percé is the seat of its regional municipality, and yet I think I saw only a handful of private residences - it is mostly one long strip of boutiques, restaurants, tourist attractions and RV parks. Percé is worth the visit, though. Although many of the gift shops are basically selling the same things and are interchangeable, some are very interesting, for example a very lovely art gallery we were in, and there is some good food to be had in the local restaurants. The view of the famous rock (le rocher de Percé) is very beautiful and fascinating, and the Île Bonaventure "parc national" (use of quotes is deliberate 
) is really amazing.
The tourists are mainly internal tourists from other parts of Québec, however, the region has a significant English-speaking minority, and a lot of people were bilingual. We were served in several businesses by owners and staff who were clearly first-language English speakers. However, I did my best to try and function completely in French this time out, for practice, and I think I did OK - people weren't switching to English to talk to me, and I always got what I ordered and wasn't killed lol.
The Québec "national park" (read: provincial park) is served by boat tours leaving every half hour. The tour is an hour long and takes you completely around the island, and you can stop on the island if you want and wait for a later boat if you want to pay the park fee (a modest $3.50 per adult). The park staff were extremely nice. I'm pretty sure I was the only anglophone on the boat, so when they were asking around for language preference for the interpretive parts of the boat tour, I didn't bother to speak up. But the tour guide happened to hear me speaking English later and came up and chatted, and did the rest of the tour bilingually even though she had to struggle with English a little. So props to the Québec national park staff - great folks!
The cliffs of the island form an amazing bird sanctuary, primarily of gannets but with many other species present, with literally tens of thousands of birds breeding and nesting on every nook and cranny of the cliffs imaginable. The air is filled with birds, no words or photos can do it justice. It was really amazing. On the other side of the island, the land slopes down to the water and you can visit an abandoned fishing settlement.
The town of Gaspé itself is quite cute. We stayed there as our based of operations and did Forillon National Park (note: a real national park) north of the town on one day and Percé south of the town on another day. We came in the south way along the Baie des Chaleurs and left via the north way, along the mouth of the St. Lawrence River all the way to Ste-Flavie and then south through the Matapédia valley through Mont Joli and Amqui. We both entered and exited Québec through the village of Point-à-la-Croix and Campbellton N.B.
I'm very happy with the decision to take the north way home, even though it was longer. The road winds through mountains and valleys, and in places hugs the coast next to hills and cliffs on a sort of causeway for miles. The region is very picturesque, and I also loved the abundant windmills. Not the least, after the rocky, nautical landscape of much of Gaspésie, the fertile, rolling valley between Mont-Joli and Amqui was a welcome change of pace.
But yeah, not a Walmart to be seen in the whole region. For someone living in the town of Gaspé, the nearest Walmart was actually in Campbellton. The region was served instead by numerous Rossy and Hart department stores, the odd Canadian Tire, and for grocery stores, you had IGA (really Sobey's), Provigo (really Loblaw's) and Metro (I think this one might be Québec-based).
If you look up the populations of some of these towns like Gaspé, Chandler and Matane on Wikipedia, some of them are similar to, or greater than, the size of New Brunswick towns like Campbellton and Bathurst which have Walmarts. These areas of N.B. have significant francophone populations and Walmart signage that is bilingual, so it doesn't seem like Walmart is inherently incapable of working in French. And like I said earlier, ripping the beating heart out of rural areas like this is sort of what Walmart does. It makes me wonder why I didn't see any.
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On July 30th, 2011 Stephen DeGrace
wrote:
Somebody just commented that there is a WalMart in Matane that I missed. Still some bugs in the comment system or else I hit Reject instead of Approve, because I thought I approved the comment but it appears to be gone. Back to the drawing board, I guess. In this age of subhuman spamjaculators, it really is hard maintaining any kind of public comment system!