Maritime Union - History

History

Maritime Union was a project pursued in 1863 and 1864 by Arthur Hamilton Gordon, the Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick. The concept of a political union was formally discussed at the Charlottetown Conference in 1864 when Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island were individual colonies in British North America, 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 idea has been raised from time to time during the 20th century, particularly during the late 1990s in the face of declining regional transfer and equalization payments from the federal government. 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.

The idea of Maritime Union - the reorganisation of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia into a single British colony - was not new. Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick had once been administered as parts of Nova Scotia, until 1769 and 1784, respectively. The region, at the time of French colonisation, was referred to in its entirety as Acadia. After Acadia fell to the British, following the Seven Years' War (what is today known as the Nova Scotia peninsula had been in British possession post-1713), the entire region was amalgamated into a single colony named Nova Scotia.

During the 1760s, the British split St. John's Island (the present-day Prince Edward Island) into a separate colony, only to merge it again with Nova Scotia several years later. By the 1780s, with the influx of Loyalist refugees from the American Revolutionary War, the disparate geographic regions that comprised Nova Scotia were again split into separate colonies. St. John's Island, New Brunswick and Cape Breton Island all received autonomy with their respective colonial administrations and capitals.

By the 1820s, Cape Breton Island was re-merged into Nova Scotia to free up that island's lucrative coal resource royalties, however the remaining two colonies of Prince Edward Island (renamed as such from St. John's Island in the 1790s) and New Brunswick maintained their colonial autonomy. 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.