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Old Posted Jul 14, 2018, 2:31 AM
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♒︎ Empirically Canadian
 
Join Date: Mar 2004
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Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123 View Post
Outports are in Newfoundland. The struggling parts of the Maritimes are small rustbelt-style towns and cities that used to be based off of steel mills, pulp mills, clothing factories, mines, shipyards, etc. Some towns like Bridgewater still have this kind of industry (Michelin plant). It is a lot like New England would be if you subtracted Boston from the picture. The Maritimes don't really have large remote populations by Canadian standards, and they are not naturally poor. They have better farmland and natural resources than New England. They were well-off prior to Confederation.

Unfortunately the Maritimes were carved up into 3 parts for political reasons. New Brunswick was created to open up new government positions and provide more political power for Loyalists who would have otherwise been ruled from Halifax. PEI was a feudalist land development scheme designed to enrich landlords in Britain.

In the very early years the Maritimes were constantly invaded since they were the borderlands between France and Britain. The Maritimes were North America's equivalent of Belgium.

In more modern times, federal and provincial development plans have arguably harmed the region. They were largely focused on helping the hardest-hit areas. This had the effect of keeping people in small towns and rural areas longer. The urban/rural split alone explains a lot of the economic gap that exists today (which is no longer that large). By that I mean that small town NS performs similarly to small town Ontario and urban NS is similar to urban Ontario, but the proportions in the two provinces are different.

As far as NS goes the centralization in Halifax is already happening. Around 2/3 of the people in the province live within an hour or so of the city (metro Halifax and the first ring of towns like Kentville, Truro, and Lunenburg). Some nearby seemingly rural areas like Hants County have are actually more like exurbs. In the future, unless something changes, almost all growth in the region will be along the Halifax-Moncton corridor plus Fredericton and Charlottetown since those are provincial capitals. Unfortunately, Saint John and Sydney have lost out in this arrangement.
There is always a certain amount of conspiratorial theorizing in this kind of analysis, overlooking the changing economic realities of modernization and the global economy. By the same token, the UK should still be the leading world power. Of course, some of it may be true, but it's not all so cut and dry, being more economic than political in it's causation. To find the answer to these perceived problems, what changes would the actual solutions involve?
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