A Region in Retrospective: The History of Atlantic Canada, 2009-2019

Abstract

REGION IS A SLIPPERY IDEA. From its earliest iteration at the turn of the century, David Russell Jack’s magazine Acadiensis concerned itself with the study of the Maritimes from a geographical perspective. With the revival of the journal in 1971, Newfoundland and Labrador were introduced as key areas of interest for scholars of the now-expanded Atlantic region. In the journal’s first essay, entitled “Acadiensis II,” Philip Bucker describes its focus as encompassing “not only the Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland, but also Gaspésia and Maine with further extensions into Central Canada and Northern New England.”1 The impetus for a journal dedicated to this area emerged out of a historiographical suspicion of nationally focused historical narratives that ignored regional concerns and produced a collective antipathy towards the sense, famously expressed by Frank Underhill, that “nothing, of course, ever happens” in the Maritimes.2 The assumption of a coherent Atlantic region that conforms with the boundaries of political geography has also inspired calls for political action. Jack, in the earliest years of the original Acadiensis, was a proponent of Maritime Union.3 Ernie Forbes argued in 1979 that the Maritime Rights Movement, the regional flavour of the social gospel, and working class activism in places like industrial Cape Breton revealed a radical sense of regionalism that emboldened various forms of resistance to structural decline.4 This vision of the Atlantic region has also invigorated calls for political action from more conservative perspectives. A future union of the region’s provinces, whether under a Maritime Union or Atlantic Union model, would – under this line of argument – reduce wasteful inefficiencies that go hand-in-hand with operating three (or four) distinct provinces. Why bother maintaining such