But moved its head office to Toronto in 1900.
It does, but that bit of Maine really doesn’t count. There’s no settlements of any size in Aroostook County, Maine, which makes up most of the border. It’s about a five hour drive from Fredericton to Portland, and those are only medium sized towns of about 60,000. To go from a real population center to another, you’re looking at the ten hour drive from Halifax to Boston.
Compare that to the neighboring communities on the Niagara peninsula or west of the Cascades, where you have Detroit and Windsor or Vancouver and Seattle just an hour or so away from each other, and whose suburbs intermingle. Heck, you could make an argument that Buffalo, Niagara Falls(-es), Hamilton and Toronto make up one giant, border straddling megalopolis.
Those are regions that take advantage of their proximity to the US. Atlantic Canada might as well all be nestled up with Newfoundland for its ability to leverage the population of the US in its favor.
Sure, but that’s a different statement than saying there far away from the US border.
Point of terminology: Nova Scotia, PEI and New Brunswick are the Maritime provinces. Those three, plus N&L, are the Atlantic provinces.
I visited the Maritimes a few years ago, and I agree with this all. My Great Grandmother was born in SpringHill. The mine closed so the family moved on and the town is utterly depressing today.
Cape Breton Island as well as the coastal drive from Halifax to there are stunningly beautiful- we did it in the fall. But Highway 316 was so bad I feared we had damaged our rental car just driving on it.
It really was a haul even reaching Sydney, involving a flight to Boston (the closest the discount airlines flew) then a drive to Portland, a ferry to Yarmouth, then a drive across to Sydney. This was a sightseeing trip but did take several days. Yes, Halifax has an airport but you’d have a heart attack checking prices from Minneapolis to there since those airports are in bed with different legacy carriers and it’s impossible to fly on discount airlines. The trip was expensive enough when the Canadian dollar was at parity. It’s a lot simpler and cheaper for U.S. tourists to go to Maine.
P.E.I has the house of Anne and beaches, but otherwise looks like Midwestern U.S. farm country.
We don’t have discount airlines in Canada, except in the most densely populated areas (eg Porter in Toronto area). Combination of huge country and low population. Airports here are non-profits, and our local airport is always trying to get US carriers to expand, but the population likely doesn’t work for discounts, which have a low margin to start with. We did have a direct flight to Chicago for a few years, but the airline discontinued because it wasn’t profitable.
And WestJet, one of our two main airlines (if it survives) is by no means a legacy airline. It’s less than 20 years old, and was set up to take advantage of deregulation.
We should also point out that Newfoundland was a separate “country” until 1949. There was a debate whether it should amalgamate with Canada or the USA, and eventually picked Canada. (Britain was anxious to dump it on someone after WWII when it could no longer afford to maintain a bankrupt colony).
The area is relatively isolated from the rest of North America. It was fine when it was on the sail route from Europe, and indeed was a major part of the colonies at that time. The agricultural land area is limited and mostly developed by the late 1800’s - and much of the rest is either by climate or terrain not agricultural land. (Just go to Google Earth or Maps satellite view to compare how much of that terrain is really agricultural - then compare with the area from Quebec City to Detroit) But as the settlements in central Canada grew, traffic bypassed them to get to Montreal and access to the far richer markets of Quebec and Ontario, and central USA. Railways really got going in the late 1800’s, but so did steam-powered ships; and a ship although slower can carry a lot more cargo a lot cheaper than a railway of that time. It made more sense to ship cargo to Montreal than to load it on a train in Halifax.
A fascinating rad would be Pierre Berton’s two books, “The National Dream” and “The Last Spike” about building the railway across Canada. It was an astounding feat of the time and meant that the Montreal port now fed a massive market stretching to Vancouver and Victoria. As industry grew, Toronto and Montreal had better cheaper access to the resources of the continent than facilitated industrialization, thus pushing the Maritimes even further into the backwater.
Also, IIRC, the feds are trying to avoid allowing US discount airlines to invade. They want them to do cross-border, but won’t allow a US carrier to fly for example a Calgary-Toronto-New York flight that can allow passengers to buy only the Calgary-Toronto portion. that would lead to eventually the end of Canadian airlines and all Canadian passengers traffic being routed through US “hub” airports.
Face it, if we were one big country, Calgary travel would go to Denver, Chicago, or Minneapolis hubs then on to Toronto. This is why we don’t have open skies.
Something that is missing from the explanations that is also relevant is the demographic shift of the eastern European immigrants that all landed on the east coast and then got the hell out and moved west.
My grandfather arrived rom Poland and worked in the coal mines near Sydney NS. My father and his siblings were all born there and when you talk to them and family friends they all hated it there. The Maritimes definitely had a British based societal class system. At the top of the list were people of British descent, followed by Scottish, then Irish, then eastern European immigrants were lumped at the bottom.
My family tells many stores of getting the shit beat out of them every day at school because they were dirty immigrants. As soon as jobs started to open up after the depression in Ontario and the west, all those hard working immigrants fled.
OTOH, many in the Maritimes head west for jobs and have for decades. I suppose the difference is the ones with deeper roots there move back when they retire. The booming Alberta economy was full of Newfies and others from there - a sign of the lack of jobs, particularly once the fisheries dwindled off.