More festivals in N.L. pull the plug on summer events due to tight margins, planning woes

Festivals across Newfoundland and Labrador are seeing an unexpected demise this year, with organizers saying tight finances and complicated logistics have led to tough decisions to cancel events planned over the summer.

The news comes on the heels of Monday's grim reveal that this year's N.L. Folk Festival concert weekend — a stalwart of St. John's summers for nearly half a century — may be its last.

The organizers of the Séamus Creagh Festival in Ferryland, Freshwater and St. John's, the Food, Fibs & Fiddles festival in Gunner's Cove and the North West River Beach Festival have all cancelled this year's events.

Rob Brown, one of the Séamus Creagh Festival's directors, says a lack of grant funding was behind the decision to spike the Labour Day weekend event.

"This year, I'm not exactly sure what happened. We were recommended to receive funding, but when it came time to provide the funding, I guess we didn't rank high enough on the list," Brown said.

Brown says the small, traditional Irish and Newfoundland music festival relies heavily on arts and culture grants to operate, and without the funding, a festival wouldn't be feasible.

But the volunteers who run the event say it's not over for good.

"This is not goodbye by any means," Brown said. "We're going to take a break for a year and do some fundraising throughout the year and ... try to hone up our grant writing and maybe see if we can get a few sponsors on board."

The Séamus Creagh Festival is a memorial event for Séamus Creagh, founded after his death in 2009. Brown says Creagh was instrumental in bringing together Irish and Newfoundland musicians, and the festival has reflected that legacy by featuring Irish acts every year.

"You can imagine the cost of flying people across the pond is quite high," Brown said.

Danny Pond, a lead organizer of the Food, Fibs & Fiddles festival in Gunner's Cove, says his own struggles lay in the logistics of putting on a large event in a rural community.

"We brought a very big show to ... a very, very remote part of the island," Pond said  "Remote parts of the island don't get to enjoy this stuff. So that was the whole purpose for the event."

Blue Rodeo headlined last year's festival, he said — and Gunner's Cove, about 30 kilometres from St. Anthony, is the smallest community the band has ever played in.

"Bringing what we brought to that area was very, very, very difficult," he said.

Both the extent of the planning and the aftermath of the events — resolving issues with the festival's partners, for instance — presented a challenge for the burgeoning festival.

Pond says some of those issues bottlenecked over the last two years, leaving organizers worried this year's event wouldn't run smoothly.

"We found ourselves in a situation that with all of that combined, we weren't going to be able to execute an event that we were able to in [2023]," he said. "We didn't want to run the risk of souring anything. We didn't want to bring the bands in that ... would go away, maybe unhappy, because we didn't have all the key parameters as refined as we should have."

But Pond, too, says he hopes this isn't the end.

"We understand that we're going to hit hiccups. We're not invincible. We don't take it for granted. So our intention is to bring this back in 2026 because again, this was an issue of timing, this was an issue of learning," he said.

The festival was planned for July 19, with Canadian band Glass Tiger headlining. Pond says organizers will be issuing refunds to ticketholders in the coming days.

The North West River Beach Festival, an outdoor Indigenous music festival in Labrador, announced on social media last week that its 2025 event wouldn't go ahead, but called on volunteers to help plan the festival for next July.

CBC requested comment from the organizers of the North West River festival, but did not receive a response. 

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