Inventing Atlantic Canada: Regionalism and the Maritime Reaction to Newfoundland’s Entry into Canadian Confederation by Corey Slumkoski (review)

If you Google the words “Maritime Link,” your search engine won’t lead you to pictures of the Confederation Bridge, or the Hopewell rocks, or the Bluenose, or one of those perfect wind-whipped clotheslines fluttering in the breeze of an outport in Newfoundland. No, none of Atlantic Canada’s standard tourism iconography swirls around this topic. That’s because the Maritime Link is serious industrial business: a proposed $1.5 billion project that will lay an undersea cable from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia and deliver clean Muskrat Falls hydroelectric power to the North American market. It is the single biggest issue in Nova Scotian politics today and the dominant debate of the 2013 election. Hard lines have been drawn. Some see the Maritime Link as a “Made in Atlantic Canada” solution that will solve the different energy crises the region faces. Others, mostly people in Halifax, don’t want to see Nova Scotia get trapped in a deal that appears to favour Newfoundlanders. Rather than knitting the region together, the Maritime Link threatens to tear it apart. Nobody on either side of the Cabot Strait wants his or her neighbour to get the upper hand, and nobody wants a repeat of the Hydro Quebec fiasco. Postcards of the Fundy Shore notwithstanding, it appears that a rising tide does not lift all boats.

Corey Slumkoski’s Inventing Atlantic Canada: Regionalism and the Maritime Reaction to Newfoundland’s Entry into Canadian Confederation takes its readers back to the newspapers, private journals, and political cartoons of the 1940s to show us that, then as now, the relationship between Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island has always been more complicated, and occasionally more conflicted and strategic, than the romantic regionalist stereotypes suggest. Weighing in at just over 130 pages, and broken into clear chapters detailing each of the provincial reactions, Slumkoski’s argument is well written, tightly focused, and convincing. Though the book retains just a hint of the clunky formatting often associated with revised dissertations, it makes a valuable and original contribution to Atlantic Canada studies and should be welcomed both by specialists in the field and by general readers.

Paying close attention to the language of Term 29 in the original Newfoundland Act of 1949, Slumkoski demonstrates that although the Maritimes played almost no active role in the negotiations with Ottawa, the terms of Newfoundland’s proposed relationship with Canada were defined in explicitly regional ways. The bankrupt colony was offered a financial promise of government social services that would be indexed to the “levels and standards … obtaining generally in the region comprising Maritime Provinces.” These words are important, and they serve an essential but oft-misunderstood function in the act. Beyond the controversial baby bonuses that are so often interpreted as the lead financial incentive that encouraged Newfoundlanders to “sell out” to Canada, Slumkoski shows us that Ottawa never actually offered Newfoundlanders the lofty, impossible-to-achieve dream of truly national standards that would guarantee identical government services in Toronto and Torbay. Instead, central Canada effectively invented Atlantic Canada by linking Newfoundland to the Maritimes and clearly defining this new region as a collection of four underdeveloped provinces that did not measure up to national social or economic standards.

Shared marginalization, collective poverty, and common underdevelopment do not provide excellent conditions for interprovincial solidarity. Though there have been many efforts to achieve “Maritime Rights” or to stimulate different versions of “Atlantic Union” or, more dramatically, an “Atlantic Revolution,” Slumkoski shows us that, almost inevitably, whenever these kinds of larger initiatives are launched, they cannot shake free of powerful pre-existing “provincial loyalties and concerns.” Demonstrating great sympathy for the Maritime premiers of the age and the harsh financial conditions they had to negotiate, Slumkoski represents Nova Scotia’s Angus L. Macdonald, New Brunswick’s John McNair, and Prince Edward Island’s Walter Jones not as...