Maritime Union

[1] The idea has been proposed at various times throughout Canadian history, most recently in November 2012 by Stephen Greene, John D. Wallace and Mike Duffy, three Conservative Senators from the region.

By the 1780s, with the influx of Loyalist refugees from the American Revolutionary War, the disparate geographic regions that composed Nova Scotia were again split into separate colonies.

During the late 1840s, Nova Scotia became the first colony in British North America to have responsible government and by the mid-1850s New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island had undergone similar political reforms.

The concept of a political union was formally discussed at the Charlottetown Conference in 1864, but that meeting resulted in Confederation of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the Province of Canada, not just of the Maritime colonies or Newfoundland.

The discussion was quietly encouraged by politicians in other provinces with the hopes of using such a union to alter the balance of representation in the federal House of Commons and the Senate, based on the belief that the Maritimes are over-represented for their relatively small populations.

Although he retracted his statement after criticism,[2] in 2001 an American author similarly stated that as the Maritime provinces require substantial transfer payments from Ottawa they would not be a viable independent country.

In the immediate years following Confederation, the anti-Confederate movement in the region advocated Maritime Union and separation from the new federation, fearing that the wealth of the provinces would be sapped to support development and growth of central and western Canada.

The growth of civil service and social program expenditures in the three provinces, coupled with out-migration and declining national political clout, led the provincial governments to examine ways to pool resources and better lobby for the region in Ottawa.

Equally important to the establishment of these formal organisations was the coordination by the mid-1970s among provincial governments for legislation to harmonise policies and programs, as well as to arrive at common positions on federal-provincial negotiations.

However, the proposal was also criticised by political activists, most notably Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians, as little more than a regional prototype for a future North American Union.

[6] Within the Maritimes, support for the concept of a formal political union of the three provinces has historically been extremely difficult to quantify by pollsters and politicians.

Additionally, many rural mainland Nova Scotians distrust the growing economic domination of Halifax and wish to maintain their remaining influence in provincial affairs.

According to environmental historian Mark McLaughlin, the idea of a Maritime Union as suggested by Conservative political leaders is a neoliberal project with intent to facilitate natural resource extraction and deregulation.