The East Wants In

When I was in graduate school—and later, teaching graduate students—the reading lists covering Quebec nationalism and Western Canadian regionalism were fat. The number of books on Ontario’s perspectives were sparse, but most of us concluded that Ontario’s dominance of Canadian politics made a uniquely Ontario perspective unnecessary: Ontario’s story was implicitly Canada’s. In all of this, Atlantic Canada, though, was an afterthought. We studied Atlantic Canada’s perspectives on the federation, but the extent to which students internalized anything resembling a uniquely Atlantic view was weak.

Yes, we learned about a series of unfavourable decisions visited on Atlantic Canada by the federal government at the time of Confederation and in the decades following. But the political science literature boiled the political culture of Atlantic Canada down to two key terms: “clientelist” and...