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Originally Posted by someone123
It is hard to predict what would happen but I think the 50/50 scenario downplays how bad the deportation was.
Closer to 3/4 of all Acadians were deported, many were killed, and a huge amount of wealth was destroyed. Before the deportation there was a "golden age" for Acadians when they were one of the wealthiest peasant groups on earth (if you believe the arguments of "A Great and Noble Scheme") and the population was growing by 3-4% a year. That was all horribly derailed, setting the region back by perhaps 50 years in development.
It is hard to imagine why this would happen though. Acadians lived in Nova Scotia for 150 years and never built any cities (Grand-Pré was a small town or village or 1,500 and was the largest single Acadian settlement). There also aren't parallel English and French metropolitan areas in Quebec. Montreal was majority English around 1850; it turned into what it is today when a large number of Francophones moved in from rural areas.
New Brunswick has its different cities but Moncton isn't even the "French" city, it's another example of Francophones moving to a majority English city in the 20th century.
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I don't know about an Acadian metropolis in the Wolfville area but I do think there would have likely been denser population in an arc from the south shore of the Bay of Fundy going around the Minas Basin up towards Moncton. This area today (especially the eastern portions to the south and north of the Minas Basin) is kind of isolated and out of the way, but had the Acadians not been deported and left alone to grow and prosper, this could have been more of a heartland for them and a region of more central importance in the Maritimes.