[LiC] Atlantic Canada's Future, Or Its Lack Thereof

[rfmcdonald]

I was interested to come across Kelly Toughill's 2 October 2004 article in the Toronto Star, A plan to kick-start Atlantic Canada's economy." Current Island premier Pat Binns and former New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna both spoke on the need to find a new development paradigm for Atlantic Canada. Conventionally enough for these times, pop-demographics entered into the discussion.

The most important point in the plans of both men is boosting the sheer number of bodies in Atlantic Canada. The population here is dropping, and aging. Forty thousand have left since the last census, and the schools will soon be all but empty. The answer, according to Binns and McKenna, is immigration, finding a way to direct the thousands of people who want to come to Canada to where they are needed most: right here.

This perceived need for immigration is debatable, given continuing double-digit unemployment across the region. One might do better to argue that Atlantic Canada has too many people, and that a policy to encourage economic renewal in the region should focus on supporting and encouraging the mass emigration of unskilled and low-skilled Atlantic Canadians to richer areas where their skills could be better rewarded. (But then, one could also argue that large-scale immigration from abroad undercuts wages and makes migration not worth the effort for Atlantic Canadians.)

Let's accept that Atlantic Canada has to attract immigration, if only for discussion purposes. What will keep these immigrants in Atlantic Canada instead of migrating to central or western Canada as soon as they can? Financial subsidies? A determined multiculturalization of the region? Just read what McKenna says at the CBC for the answer:

[McKenna] says the federal government should consider forcing immigrants to settle in an Atlantic Canada. "I'll tell you frankly, I can't see for the life of me why a refugee from Bangladesh would have more rights than a community of two million people here in Atlantic Canada that simply want a chance to grow and thrive and make this region better," he says.

Wow. So, a former provincial premier wants to create a second class of Canadian citizenship based solely on national origin (and, I suspect, on national origins as yet relatively uncommon in the Anglo-Celtic-French Maritimes). Perhaps we should go enthusiastically down that route and arrange a deal with Sudan? vcutag, among others, can tell everyone here how wonderfully that sort of deal worked out for Virginia.

I've written about Atlantic Canada's serious issues with the whole concept of workable development plans in the past: See my letter published in the Charlottetown Guardian, Lloyd Kerry's reply, and my unpublished reply to Kerry. I remain decidedly skeptical about the possibility of an Atlantic Canada response; I fully expect Atlantic Canada to continue its drift downward, past any number of countries of comparable size and immensely worse histories. The Estonians certainly deserve their impending victory.

I doubt that very much will change, now or ever. Perhaps fortunately, the continuing shrinkage of Atlantic Canada's population and economy relative to Canadian totals will make subsidies increasingly affordable. In a recent post, I said that no point of divergence in the late 19th century could save Atlantic Canada from decline. Lately, I've been thinking that you might need a much earlier change to avoid Atlantic Canada's marginalization, perhaps avoiding the ethnic cleansing of the Acadiens in the mid-18th century, or seeing the survival of Portugal's Cape Breton settlement of the 1520s. If the costs of emigration were higher, perhaps people might be more innovative. Québec's success in the 20th century is what I'm thinking of.

Myself, I'm just as happy that I'm Anglophone. It's nice to have been able to migrate without havnig to learn a new language.