Atlantic Canada Speaks Out

Here is an interesting letter from a fellow Maritimer. He's more subtle than I am in calling these Upper Canadians "unwittingly imperialist."

graham at uni dot ca

Being a bit of a political junky, I looked through your website with some keen interest. It seems that there is an honest attempt to so-called 'solve' the county's problems, but there are major problems in your writing as concerns people, like me, from Atlantic Canada. Historically, few in this region wanted to join Canada to begin with. Arms were twisted by imperial powers to force integration. Things have changed in many ways, but latently, at least, most Atlantic Canadians feel somehow that it is our destiny to be shafted by 'Upper Canada'. From Joseph Howe to Joey Smallwood, the idea in Atlantic Canada was that the powers that be didn't want us to be independent so we had to cut the best deal we could. They predicted that our banking, agricultural, industrial, and trade standards would be dictated by the demographic core of the country and we, consequently, would lose control of them. On these counts, you would have to be lying to yourself to believe that they were in any way wrong. As this was foreseen, the hope was that some minimal guarantees of governmental service and political representation could allow our cultures to withstand the new imperialism that would inevitably try to reinvent our cultures and industry.

But alas, the good hearts of Unity believe somehow that the "martimes" are overrepresented in the senate. They are not wrong in proportion to the population. They are wrong, however, to characterize Newfoundland as being part of the Maritimes--it is not and never has been. They are also wrong to suggest that this "over-representation" somehow needs to be corrected. It was a minimal guarantee to the loss of our respective sovereignties. I could go on for hundreds of pages on how this destroyed thriving small economies and diverse cultural groupings, but instead would invite contributors just to make an effort to understand different regions' histories with balanced reviews of artifacts and historical documents rather than the unwittingly imperialist underpinnings of Toronto/Montreal publishers.

Hopelessly yours,

Malcolm Smith
Sent July 2007