By John Francis
I remember the first time I ever met Dona (Chishom) LaFontaine. I had just bought a house in Tobermory and was trying to find a way to earn a living on the Bruce Peninsula. That was even more of a challenge in 1979 than it is now. Life was a matter of deciding which bills to pay and which ones to kick down the road.
The mortgage rates were appalling at that time. I was paying 19% but some friends of mine were paying even more. And bad as mortgage rates were, VISA was always worse. You did not want to get behind on those bills because the interest would kill you.
Dona was the Township Tax Clerk, responsible for collecting the taxes from all the landowners in St Edmunds Township. The Township only charged 1% per month on unpaid taxes, which was the best interest rate around — a bargain! Dona explained to me how far in arrears I could get before the Township would seize my property and sell it. She explained all of this with a grin on her face and a twinkle in her eye. She understood being broke.
I also remember the last time I talked to her, a year or two before her death in 2023. Dona got to reminiscing about growing up in Tobermory in the depression and the war (she was born in 1931).
One of the things she told me about was her first job, washing dishes at Ritchie’s Restaurant in the building that eventually became Divers Den. She started when she was 13, which means it was probably 1944. She did the dishes in an oval, ceramic basin. “There wasn’t a proper kitchen,” she explained. Even though it was purpose-built as a restaurant! It didn’t have washrooms either. But that’s not a big surprise — it was built before hydro came to Tobermory and without hydro, there was no running water.
There were a pair of outhouses at the head of Little Tub Harbour that served the travelling public for many years.
There was also a restaurant on the hillside above Golden’s (now Lee’s) fisheries, back when the ferries docked there. That restaurant is long gone but its two-hole outhouse was still (more or less) standing a few years ago.
Back in the day, all a restaurant needed was chairs, tables and a stove to cook on. Some Tobermory restaurants were opened in vacant houses; others were opened in net sheds around the harbour.
The 20th century was hard times for the Bruce Peninsula. The best of the timber was cut and milled by early in the century and the 1908 fire burned most of what was left. Lake Trout carried the economy for a couple of decades after that, but the stocks were dwindling fast by the time the depression set in.
The thing that made it possible to live here was the low property values. The peninsula’s pioneers were poor and so were their children and grandchildren, but they fished, hunted, milled their own lumber, cut their own firewood and kept chickens and cows. They got by.
So it’s not surprising that most restaurants were operated on a shoestring budget. There were no public health regulations to speak of and the buildings didn’t need heat or insulation because everything closed down in the off season — locals couldn’t afford to eat in restaurants.
An illustration of the precarious finances of Tobermory’s restaurant sector: the rainy summer of 1992 dramatically reduced tourism. Ten Tobermory restaurants went bankrupt in the aftermath.
But over the last twenty-five years, things have switched a hundred and eighty degrees. Most peninsula residents can now afford to eat in restaurants, but restaurant workers can’t afford to live here because housing is so expensive.
Thirty to fifty years ago, a modest house on the peninsula cost about 8,000 hours at the minimum wage. Say $3.00/$25,000 in 1979; $4.00/$32,000 in 1984, $6.35/$50,000 in 1992; $6.85/$60,000 in 2000.
Most full-time workers put in 1,750 to 2,000 hours per year, so that was four or five years’ wages to buy a house.
For awhile in 2022 those numbers were $15 and $500,000, which means a modest house cost more than 33,000 hours at the minimum wage — that’s about 19 years of work, four times what it used to be. Even if there are two wage-earners, that was still nine-and-a-half years of work. The numbers have improved somewhat since then — the current numbers are more like $17.20 and $425,000, which puts a modest house at 24,700 hours at the minimum wage. It’s definitely an improvement but it’s still way out of reach, even with two minimum-wage incomes.
1,750 hours at $17.20 comes to $30,100. If you’re going to spend 30% of your income on rent/mortgage, that comes to $9,030, or $752 per month.
That would service a mortgage of no more than $150,000. You can barely find a building lot for that. And good luck trying to find a rental at that price. Come to think of it: good luck finding a rental at any price.
For seasonal restaurant workers, though it’s even worse than that. Off-season Unemployment Insurance provides only 55% of their summer earnings.
And it’s not much better for the restaurant owners. Tariffs will probably raise food prices, while a tariff-induced recession will bite into the disposable income people spend in restaurants.
So it’s going to be a tough year for our restaurants and their staff. Remember: they’re paying the same housing prices we are. Be generous.
