Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
Most people in the Maritimes live in Nova Scotia, even though most of the land mass is New Brunswick.
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Haligonians love to trumpet the fact that the majority of Maritimers live in NS, without quantifying what exactly that plurality is. They hope that the uninformed will assume that 60% of Maritimers or maybe even 75% of Maritimers live on the Nova Scotia peninsula. In fact, only
51.3% of Maritimers live in NS, and of that total, over 8% live in Cape Breton, far removed from Halifax. This means that only 43.2% of Maritimers live on mainland Nova Scotia. Halifax's CMA is about 420,000, meaning that
only 22% of Maritimers live in it's primate city.
Halifax is unquestionably the Maritimes largest city (by far), but relatively speaking, as a regional metropole, it is probably proportionately the smallest and least influential in the entire Dominion.
If I were to chose a capital for a mythical united Maritime province, I wouldn't necessarily chose Moncton (which would surprise a lot of people I'm sure). Moncton is bilingual, is the geographically most central city and lies close to the regional population isocenter. These facts are all true, but Moncton doesn't have the historical gravitas of a capital and Moncton's history (and destiny) is that of a commercial centre. For this reason, my preference for a Maritime capital would be
Charlottetown.
I choose Charlottetown because it is the birthplace of confederation. In fact, the original 1864 meeting was to discuss the concept of Maritime union before those politicians from the Canada's (led by John A MacDonald) decided to crash the party. This history has to count for something.
Of the three current capitals, Charlottetown feels most like a capital city. The legislature in Fredericton is unimposing. The legislature in Halifax is lost in the forest of commercial towers. The legislature in Charlottetown however sits in the city centre, surrounded by parkland and is right next to the Confederation Centre of the Arts. Great George Street leads from Province House directly to the waterfront and is a designated historical street. The whole city revolves around the government, it's symbols and the place of Charlottetown in the historical context of Canada. No other city in the entire country is anything like this (aside from Ottawa). Charlottetown deserves to be the capital..........
If BC can have an island capital, certainly the Maritimes can too...........