The signs on fifth street read, “Parking limit 60 min.” No one remembers when the bylaw was last enforced. The street is awash in empty parking spaces. Still, the sign serves a purpose. Like the colourful murals of stuffed shop windows that have been painted over the boarded-up faades of once-prosperous stores, it creates the illusion of commerce—of life.

This is Murdochville, Quebec's Potemkin village.

At one end of the street rises Mont Copper, a lunar-looking elevation scarred by the Noranda Inc. mine that was the town's past. At the other end is Mont Miller, a verdant slope that could be the town's future. Trapped between the two mountains, Murdochville's citizens wage their little civil war. In a company town that no longer has a company, the battle is between those who want to shut down the place and those who want to rebuild it.

“ It was a good place to live when it was livable,” says Jean-Aimé Côté as he putters in his yard on Fourth Street, an “À Vendre” sign in the window. “But it's no longer livable. The town is divided. When you can't talk to your neighbours, it's not pleasant. We're getting out as soon as we can.”

That may not be soon at all. Ct's house has been on the market for more than a year. Last year, one of the many abandoned homes taken over by the town—three bedrooms, finished basement—could be had for as little as $3,000.

In its heyday, Murdochville, nestled inland on the remote Gaspé Peninsula almost 1,000 kilometres from Montreal, was a rich and vibrant community of more than 4,000 people. Today, the permanent population has dwindled to barely 600—and counting. Two of the town's schools are empty and in disrepair; the third, the cole des Prospecteurs, has 90 students, from kindergarten to the end of high school, down from 216 three years ago.

Twice in 2002, a majority of the townspeople voted to ask the Quebec government to buy their houses—at big-city prices—and shutter the town. The then-Parti Québécois government said no. “As long as there is no effort from the government to really revive the place—which would take attracting a sizable industry here—this is a town that will die a slow death,” says ex-mayor Marc Minville, a soft-spoken lab technician who analyzed copper samples at Noranda for three decades. “You want to know what I really think? I think that's what the government wants in the end.”

Battle-weary, Minville surrendered last July. He quit as mayor and left Murdochville, his home of 34 years, for good. “Without money for decontamination, you can't build a town on that soil,” says Minville, referring to the potentially high levels of lead, arsenic and copper in the ground around Murdochville (the Quebec Environment Ministry and Noranda have recently agreed on a cleanup schedule.)

It's clear, though, that the soil's not the biggest problem here. In Murdochville, it's the air that's poisoned—with above-acceptable levels of bitterness.

There is nothing novel about the crisis facing the town, nor its residents' divided reaction to it. Indeed, settlements tied to a single employer tapping non-renewable resources have been a fact of life in Canada since its discovery by the Europeans. By nature, such communities are ephemeral. A few company towns have managed to rise from the mining debris, finding a new economic base. But most of them end up struggling to survive, until finally they're levelled or left to moulder.

For a small and young place, Murdochville has an awful lot of history running through it. The currents that shaped modern Quebec—the struggle for control of the economy, Duplessis-era repression, Quiet Revolution nationalism and finally globalization—all figure in the town's fate.

Engineering history was made in the colossal task of building Murdochville in the late 1940s. The site was deep in the bush. Noranda had to build not only a mine, but an entire town for 3,000 people. The province injected $10 million to hook up roads and power. Noranda invested about $35 million to build the mine, a copper concentrator and smelter, and the town.

Named for Noranda's first president, James Y. Murdoch, Murdochville was the envy of eastern Quebec when it was incorporated in 1953. It boasted modern facilities, from the cinema and recreational complex to the hospital and schools. The region had long been dependent on the vagaries of the fishing industry, so hundreds of people were attracted to Murdochville by the prospect of stable, high-paying jobs. In its first year, the Noranda mine's payroll was $4.2 million, or about $4,600 per worker—$1,000 more than the provincial average, and $2,000 more than the Gasp average.

Prosperity only seemed to embolden the mine's workers, who formed a union in 1954. It might have survived had the miners not sought to ally, two years later, with Noranda's bte noire, the United Steelworkers of America. The company refused to negotiate. Tensions mounted until March, 1957, when the mine's 1,000 workers walked out.

The battle became a cause clbre as the Montreal intelligentsia took up the issue. Scabs and police, with the benediction of authoritarian premier Maurice Duplessis and the clergy, put down angry strikers. One worker died, and dozens were seriously injured.

In August, 1957, more than 600 sympathizers from across Quebec came to Murdochville to show their solidarity with the workers. At the head of the procession was a young law professor named Pierre Trudeau. Also in the crowd was Radio-Canada journalist René Lévesque.

The protest did nothing to soften the resolve of Duplessis or Noranda. Ceding defeat, the workers ended their strike in October. Almost half of them never got their jobs back. The strike, and a court order that the union pay $1.5 million for damages, earned a certain infamy when the Front de libération du Québec cited them in its 1970 manifesto.

The union was eventually certified in Murdochville. But labour strife never again reached the 1957 level, in part thanks to a booming economy. By 1974, Murdochville's population had soared to about 4,700, including 2,000 Noranda workers. “The town was in a growth mode. The mine always seemed to be expanding, so there was never a sense that this was a finite resource,” recalls Dale Coffin, a third-generation Murdochville miner who later worked for Noranda in Toronto. “We had a good thing going. We had an indoor hockey rink long before most of the Gasp. Bowling, curling, skiing—you name it. It's only in hindsight that you realize how ideal it was.”

But Murdochville was living on borrowed time. By 1982, the open-pit mine had been depleted. Employment plummeted to 600, the town's population to 1,600. In 1999, the underground mine closed and another 300 workers lost their jobs. Noranda invested $140 million to keep the smelter open, with a new role: to transform copper concentrate, shipped mostly from Noranda's mines in Latin America, into copper anodes. The strategy, a risky one from the outset given the transportation and labour costs, proved unviable by late 2001, due to a drop in copper prices and the emergence of low-cost operators in China. In March, 2002, the company announced that it would close the smelter a month later. More than 300 workers were left jobless.

In the closure's aftermath, about half of the 1,200 residents simply left, some abandoning their homes. The remainder split into two camps. The first wanted to stay and rebuild the town's economic base. The second, led by then-mayor Minville, sought compensation from Noranda (well above the severance provision of the union contract) and the province, so they could leave town and start anew elsewhere. They cited the slim prospects for economic revival, soil contamination and the small contingent of ex-miners afflicted with allegedly work-related respiratory problems. “As a taxpayer, I never had a problem with Noranda. It paid 70% of the town's taxes,” says Minville. “But it is now trying to get out of town by paying as little as possible.”

But Noranda could have pulled out in 1999. Shareholders probably wished it had. Instead of acting strictly on the financials, the company gave Murdochville three more years to prepare for the inevitable. “We all knew many years ago that there was a finite life to that mine. We went to the community. But the town's leadership didn't want to address it then,” company spokesman Denis Couture says. “We have lived up to our obligations. When you move to Murdochville as an employee of Noranda, you know you are moving into a mining town and you know there is an end to that.”

When it announced the closure of the smelter, Noranda put up $20 million, about a third of which went toward severance packages provided for under the collective agreement. The rest was dispensed in a series of measures, including early-retirement bonuses and an offer to pay employees up to 65% of the 1998 market value of their homes. Noranda also agreed to pay $350,000 a year in taxes to the town until 2009. To Minville, it was a slap in the face.

Francine Roy, general manager of the local chamber of commerce, can only shake her head at the stance of the buy-us-out camp. “The Noranda workers were treated well. The ones who cry the loudest are the ones who least need the money. When the average salary at the mine was $51,000, none of them ever talked about contaminated soil. Now that the mine's closed, they say the ground is polluted. You have to ask yourself why.”

As for Minville's appeal to the province, the Liberal government has been unmoved, like its PQ predecessor. It did match the $1 million Ottawa granted to the town to help it attract new industry, and persuaded the provincial auto insurance board to open a call centre in town, creating about 60 jobs. As for buying out the town—which could cost $50 million—no government wants to set that example.

With so many businesses closing—including the town's main grocery store—Roy and the town's “revival commissioner,” Andér Lemieux, spend their days mining databases to find investors so the town can start to rebuild its tax base. Luckily, they have something to offer. Noranda has ceded its buildings to the town for a future industrial park. And there are the amenities—the recreational complex with its pool, hockey arena and curling rink, the golf course and modern health clinic—which are rarely found in a town of Murdochville's size.

“ We can't diversify our economy overnight,” Roy concedes. “But it will happen.” There's a $180-million windmill park being built on surrounding mountains, creating about 150 short-term construction jobs. And Roy envisions a day when the ski hill on Mont Miller will become a resort like Mont Tremblant. “Take anybody who skis at Tremblant and bring them here. I guarantee you they'll prefer Mont Miller,” says Roy. “We've got all natural snow and no lineups.”

Minville laughs off Roy's optimism. “I'm a realist. I don't think it's responsible to dangle dreams before the population. It's not tourism that is going to assure this town's future. It would never generate enough taxes to guarantee existing services. And the idea of a Mont Tremblant in Murdochville, well, no investor would consider it. We don't have the population density or an international airport nearby to justify that kind of development.” But what of the call centre and windmills? “You can't operate a town on 60 call-centre jobs. And the wind park won't create more than 10 full-time jobs.”

Indeed, even the wind-energy boom in Quebec is not blowing Murdochville's way. The town had prayed it would become the centre of a $1.9-billion investment in wind power, including eight wind parks and a windmill assembly plant, unveiled by Hydro-Qubec and the provincial government in October. Instead, the projects all went to coastal communities in the Gaspé.

The mayor's chamber has an unused look to it. A desk devoid of papers. There's no computer, just a telephone. Minville was only replaced in November, by Councillor Delisca Roussy in an uncontested election. Behind the mayor's desk hangs the town flag. Its stylized “M” represents both a copper anode and the town's initial. There is a fleur-de-lis, a maple leaf and the smelter with its (now demolished) chimney. Below, the town's motto— “Labor Omnia Vincit.” Work overcomes all difficulties.

That may be true. But Murdochville, like so many company towns before it, has left the heavy lifting to the end.