I’m talking about New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Despite a seemingly advantageous position on the Atlantic coast, these provinces have only a few mid-sized cities (the largest, Halifax, has just 400,000 people in its metro area). They are relatively poor. Unlike, say, Vancouver or Montreal, they are not an international travel destination. They rarely make the world news, and I would venture to say that very little is known about them outside of Canada.
I understand that they have some challenging weather and maybe some dodgy tides, but are there other reasons why these provinces remain so underdeveloped and off the radar?
I am not a Canadian, but my WAG is that it’s partly that the vast majority of Canada’s population lies within a hundred miles of the U.S. border. The Atlantic provinces are well situated for oceanic trade, but they are a far distance from the American border.
My guess, but I’m theorising here, is the existence of the Saint Lawrence river. In the United States, the East Coast - particularly New York and Boston - developed very fast and early on in the country’s history as economic centres, because that is where the ports were that handled trade with Europe and where immigrants arrived. Canada has the Saint Lawrence river, which allows ships coming in from the Atlantic to gar far inland. That allowed the economically dominant urban centres (Montreal at first, later surpassed by Toronto) to develop further inland, closer to where the resources of the country are.
You see the same thing with New Hampshire and Maine beaches. Yes, they are very nice, but summer lasts for about an hour and a half. I’m sure it’s even worse further north.
Why would I want to sunbathe in Newfoundland and freeze my balls off when I can go to ports further south and be warm?
The OP mentioned Vancouver by name, yet didn’t seem to notice that the west coast has no major cities either. North of Vancouver is no different than north of Montreal. Velocity had a good guess about being distant from the USA, but in my opinion it’s just a coincidence resulting from the fact that the border is practically a straight line east-west. Too far from the border is identical to too far north and too damn cold.
And looking at the map, there’s not too much on the east coast of Asia either. North of Japan, forget it. The west coast of Europe seems to be an exception, possibly resulting from those countries being smaller than the other three coasts, and a few centuries headstart in modernization.
A river can be an inducement for commerce, but a barrier as well. If a shipping center developed in Halifax, the trucking connection to the USA would be unfavorable due to the river being in the way.
Speaking only of Nova Scotia where I briefly lived and know a little about, its economy was based on fishing, which collapsed due to overfishing and abuse and has never recovered, shipbuilding, which collapsed as all the big trees were cut down and wooden ships became obsolete anyway, coal mining – they got the coal out and the mines were abandoned. Pattern? It has the agricultural issues of New England – short season and poor soil in most places, little flat ground.
Now the main industries are tourism (again, short season), and cutting the small trees for paper pulp.
Prince Edward Island is flat and has good soil, used to be a beautiful mixed farmland but big ag has taken it over and now it is mostly monocropped potatoes.
I live on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. I think it is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Due to its poverty and isolation it may remain that way.
I would agree with Schnitte. The Saint Lawrence creates a different economic dynamic for Canada, compared to the east coast of the US. It is a broad maritime highway that goes far inland, all the way to the Great Lakes. Particularly with the development of the St Lawrence Seaway, trade doesn’t need to be landed at harbours in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to be shipped inland, unlike New York or Boston in the States.
Prior to the development of the Seaway, Halifax played a greater economic role, and in fact access to Halifax as a year-round ice-free port was one of the goals of Confederation. Our Constitution required the federal government to build a railway connecting Ontario and Quebec with Halifax. Halifax also boomed during the 19th century as the major base for the Royal Navy, but that ended in the early 20th century as Britain withdrew.
One of the major themes in Canadian history analysis has been the central role of the Saint Lawrence in our economic and political development. See “The Commercial Empire of the Saint Lawrence” by Donald Creighton, for example, as well as the earlier writings by Harold Innis.
That’s the general comment about Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
Prince Edward Island is way too small to have much economic impact, with a population of only ~ 150,000 people.
Newfoundland & Labrador is different. It’s nickname is “The Rock” and it’s well-earned. It doesn’t have much by way of agriculture. It’s economy has generally been based on the sea, but that only goes so far, especially when the cod fisheries collapsed. It doesn’t have a lot of industry, in part because it’s so far away from the rest of North American settlement. Off-shore oil is a big component of its economy.
Vancouver metropolitan area has a population of about 2.5 million, which strikes me as a major city. It’s Canada’s 3rd largest, and the Port of Vancouver is the busiest port on our west coast.
Vancouver is on the coast and there are other port cities to the north on the coast. Montreal is not on the coast but far inland. Not sure what you mean here?
The border is a straight line out west, but not so in the east. The southern most point in Canada, Pelee Point and Island in Ontario, is the same latitude as Northern California, while the border with Maine is at 47 degrees.
I think all of this is readily explainable by terrain and climate.
The Canadian Maritimes, if you look at them, are either remote islands, or remote peninsulas that are cut off from the mainland by the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Labrador is a mountainous tundra climate.
Vancouver is a major city, but as you get north of it, the province becomes very mountainous, cut by bays, and a lot of it is inland of Vancouver Island. North of that, it’s so mountainous that there’s nowhere that makes sense to build except fishing towns.
East Asia north of Japan has a very cold climate. The Sea of Okhotsk is not navigable for much of the winter due to drift ice. Again, it doesn’t support much except fishing towns.
We’re talking 18th and early 19th century here, the time when the major urban centres in Canada and the US developed. At that time trucking was not an available mode of transport; not even railways were - the most efficient way of hauling large amounts of cargo was by boat, both on the oceans and on rivers and canals (viz. the importance of the Erie Canal in the economic history of the United States). Sure, now trucking is an available mode of transport. But by now, path dependencies have come into play which have had the effect that the urban centres are still where they developed in the past.
