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  • Inventing Atlantic Canada: Regionalism and the Maritime Reaction to Newfoundland’s Entry into Canadian Confederation
  • Jeff A. Webb
Inventing Atlantic Canada: Regionalism and the Maritime Reaction to Newfoundland’s Entry into Canadian Confederation. Corey Slumkoski. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Pp. 224, $24.95

The title of Corey Slumkoski’s book alerts us to several arguments and assumptions. First, that ‘Atlantic Canada’ was invented rather than being something that existed naturally, and second, that it was invented by federal government negotiators rather than people living in the provinces. This book is about the way that Newfoundland’s joining Canada in 1949 ‘invented’ a region called Atlantic Canada. It’s also about the missed opportunity that the new potential partner presented for the governments of the Atlantic provinces to unite in their efforts to redress structural problems in the federation.

When it joined Canada, Newfoundland relinquished the power to collect import duties and income tax, and it was clear that the resulting provincial government would be unable to raise the cash necessary to provide government services at the standard Canadians expected. The federal government hesitated to grant Newfoundland a permanent subsidy because it feared the existing provinces would then want their fiscal problems addressed. The solution was a transitional grant to Newfoundland and a commitment, in Term 29, to investigate the question of finances and, if necessary, provide a subsidy that would raise the fiscal capacity of the new province to the average of those relatively poor provinces nearby. Joseph Smallwood believed that Term 29 assured the province of support from Ottawa, but it didn’t work out the way he had hoped. The federal government saved money, the Maritime provinces could rest assured that the newcomer would not be getting anything extra from Ottawa that they did not get, and Newfoundlanders were reminded that they should expect a lower level of government services than the citizens of the provinces such as Ontario took for granted. If that is the basis of a region called Atlantic Canada, then it’s not surprising that people continued to see themselves as citizens of their respective provinces.

Slumkoski suggests that while negotiating the Terms of Union, the government in Ottawa started to see Newfoundland as an extension of the Maritime Provinces in other ways. Newfoundlanders can be forgiven for not seeing advantages in the loss of local control and a direct relationship with the corridors of power in London, when they were exchanged for an indirect relationship with Ottawa and local needs being subsumed in a general category. There were other concerns as well, which Slumkoski might see as cases of provincialism getting in the way of a hypothetical co-operation, but I am not so sure that the people in any of the provinces saw it that way. [End Page 508]

There is a broad interest among historians in how national or regional identities are forged, but Slumkoski’s book is not a history of an identity. It is a history of the varying ways the existing Maritime Provinces viewed the prospect of Newfoundland’s joining them. Selfinterest determined how each of the Maritime Provinces viewed the admission of the new province, and the economic interests resulted in reactions that varied from support, through indifference, to hostility. Slumkoski advances the idea that there was a regionalism, by which he means a self-awareness among provincial politicians that they stood to gain more by taking a united stand in their relationship with Ottawa than they did by pursuing their individual interests. This might have manifested itself in a movement to decentralize power and build more powerful provinces, or, as interests Slumkoski, a movement to unite provinces in their effort to get a fairer deal from Ottawa. In some people’s minds, the usefulness of the concept of regionalism is that it describes, for example, the residents of a province or a territory who feel a loyalty to each other and sometimes feel that they are being communally oppressed by another region. Regionalism might be thought of as similar to nationalism, but while the goal of nationalism might be sovereignty, the goal of regionalism might be to play a greater role within...

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