Robin Neill
Economics, U.P.E.I.
September, 2002
(1a) Canada Continentalized
By the end of the twentieth century the forces of history had formed Canada
into a regionalized confederation with stronger economic ties to the rest
of the continent than to itself. Forty percent of Canada's GDP was tied to
external trade, and only twenty percent was tied to interprovincial trade.
All the provinces, except Prince Edward Island, traded more with the rest of
the world than with other provinces. Exports and imports, taken together,
were over 80% of Canada's Gross National Product, and over 80% of trade was
with the rest of North America. Ontario and Quebec had 90% of their trade
with the United States.
The forces of continentalization in Canada had been operative over its entire history and across the whole of the nation. Their strength had been renforced by their distinctive, but equally strong regional impacts. Working in different ways in different provinces at different times they had mutually validated their outcomes.
A proposed trans national political union, Cascadia, on the West Coast was validated by a similar state-province union, Atlantica, proposed on the East Coast. Neither proposition was substantially new. The West Coast, though initially globalized from Spain and Russia, was continentalized in the 1850s by the northward movement of an American mining frontier. A petition was sent to Washington to have the colony annexed to the United States. Nova Scotia was settled twice from New England: once following the Explusion, and again following the American Revolution. Boston was the Maritimes natural metropolis. The United States Free Homestead System moved north with the continental settlement frontier onto the Canadian Prairies in the late nineteenth century. A decade after the formal adoption of the system in Canada, there was a plot to separate Manitoba from Canada, and to seek its annexation to the United States. Southern Ontario was settled during the post Revolutionary northward movement of the continental frontier. Governor Simcoe modeled Upper Canada on Virginia and Massachussets. In 1849, the elite of Montreal issued their Annexation Manifesto, and in 1893, Laurier was confronted with a Continental Union League, centered on the person of Goldwin Smith, who argued and lobbied for annexation to the United States. In that same period, Maritimers, disappointed with Confederation and the National Policy, flirted with the idea of a formal political connection with New England. While each of these proposals for continental union failed, taken together they indicate the relentless movement of history.
The historical lines of continentalization had filled in and darkened over time. Following Magellan's circum-navigation of the globe by a century, France and England had planted colonies in America. Acadians traded furs for dry goods and produce with New Englanders, but it was a time of war between England and France. Eventually the greater success of the English colonies led to the conquest of New France. French Europe survived in America, but, following the American War of Independence, Loyalists came north with land tenure institutions matured in America, and with a mentality different from that of the French remnant. In the nineteenth century immigrants came from Britain, but continental ways of settlement came north. Trade and money moved north and south. The pound moved south to New York and back to Britain. Banking institutions, monetary policy, and the dollar moved north to Canada and stayed. Eventually francophone Canada formally abandoned its European land tenure and adopted one that approached continental norms
Over the turn of the twentieth century, British investment in railways, and migration from Eastern Europe seemed to bias the globalization of Canada against continental solidarity. The Wheat Economy mimicked France's passage from Europe and seemed to be reestablishing the east-west unity of the old fir trade out of Montreal. But even as the New Imperialism challenged continental integrity, two new frontiers, in mining and forestry, and in manufacturing moved north. The connection to Europe in the last half of the nineteenth century was different from that in the eighteenth century, at the least because in the eighteen seventy the Maritimes and francophone Quebec were economically delinked.
(1b) Continentalization: a Structural Element in Globalization
The broad historical context of these domestic American events is well known.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at the dawning of the Age of Sail,
when transnational expansion of economic activity first became global, the
agents of advance were the nation states of Europe. They were the winners as
Europe reduced its reliance on the city states of Italy and the Hanse, and
on the loose imperial relationships that characterised the preceding age of
feudalism. They were the agents of plantation when New France, New England,
new Holland, new Sweden. and new Spain came into existence in America. In
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Age of Sail gave way to the
Railway Epoch, then to the Period of the Internal Combustion Engine and the
Electric Dynamo, and finally to jet propulsion and computers in the Time of
Telematics. In consequence the small nation states of sixteenth century
Europe lost out to the transcontinental states of the nineteenth century, and
the transcontinental states yielded to a triad of continental unities in the
twentieth century: the European Economic Community, the West Pacific Rim, and
North America. At the end of the twentieth century, continentalization was
the emerging formal tendency in the relentless process of economic
globalization.
There have been, however, two tendencies in the process of globalization: integration and disintegration: globalization and "glocalization". As the global economy restructures itself there are winners and losers. Unities that characterize one era disintegrate in another. Centers and regions are "linked" and "delinked" to and from centers of economic enterprise. Wholes and constituent parts form and reform. In Canada formation and reformation has been related to the historical forces of imperialism, nationalism, continentalism, and regionalism.
The question of Maritimes economic growth is, then, to what extent, if any, and in what way has the Maritimes been reconfigured and delinked or relinked in the distant and immediate past? That is, what is the place of the Maritimes in the new "grand narrative" of globalization?
(2a) Europe, Imperialism, and the Staple Theory
Innis and Mackintosh knew they described only a moment in Canadian history:
the moment of the New Imperialism and the formation of transcontinental
nation states. Mackintosh searched Canadian history for the kind of staple
development that had characterized Virginia and the West Indies in the
seventeenth century. He found it in late nineteenth century
expansion of the British Empire on the Canadian Prairies. Innis was
quick to point out that what Mackintosh had found was only one of several
moments in Canadian history (2), but his own accounts did not stress this
insight.
Distracted by the conditions of his time, Harold Innis frequently wrote explications of very long run economic factors integrating Canada; and that is how he has been read, because that was the part of his work that best fitted into the information environment of a generation preoccupied with the emergence of Canada from subordination in the British Empire, and with a massive economic depression. But Innis's work went beyond that. He sketched equally important disintegrating factors. His first book, The Fur Trade, was followed by The Cod Fisheries, and that was followed by "Imperfect Regional Competition and Political Institutions on the Atlantic Seabord" and by "Decentralization and Democracy". Had he not, in the last dozen years of his life, obsessed on the role of communication technology and information environments in the processes of globalization - the rise and fall of empires - his legacy would have been a more balanced picture of economic development in Canada.
Unquestionably aware of the regionalized nature of Canada, Innis was not aware of one important factor in regionalization, and it showed in his treatment of the Maritimes. The Maritimes, as such, hardly attracted his attention, even in The Cod Fisheries, which was a study of an international economy extending from the West Country through Newfoundland to New England. Even if he had he looked directly at Nova Scotia, however, agriculture would not have caught his attention, because agriculture was not the focus of any of his studies. He watched the railroad shape a transcontinental economy, to which Western agriculture was an appendage studied by W.A. Mackintosh. He saw the fur trade as a precursor of transcontinental development with agriculture in New France relegated to the position of a backward linkage. From his point of view the Maritimes was detached from the rest of Canada, part of a relatively declining North Atlantic economy, a vestige of the Age of Sail. With respect to the region's detachement from the rest of Canada, he was right. The region would have been left out of the transcontinentalization phase of globalization had it not been linked politically at Confederation (3). What Innis failed to see was the substantial role of agriculture in Maritimes development, both relating it to and distinguishing it from other regions in Canada.
(2b)Continentalizing the Paradigm
The staple export paradigm associated with Innis and Mackintosh disposed
viewers toward unwarranted assumptions about the roles of agriculture,
commerce and manufacturing in Canadian economic development; assumptions that
were the subject of a question prompted by O.J. Firestone, and raised by Ken
Buckley. How much investment took place, in what sectors and regions, and
what interconnections were involved?. The question challenged the extention
of the imperialist-staples view of late ninetenenth century Canada to the
whole range of Canadian history, but it suggested nothing to replace that
view.
According to Adam Smith, economic development was a passage through a sequence of stages: a gathering stage, an agricultural stage, a commercial stage, and a manufacturing stage; in that order. This was the "natural order" of development which, according to Smith, was exemplified in the more rapid growth of Britain's American colonies (4).
Buckley's question was open to this Smithian perception. It liberated agriculture and manufacturing from a presumed dependence on staple exports. It opened the door to fresh questions about the relative strengths and weaknesses of agriculture and manufacturing in different parts of Canada. But Buckley was interested in measuring something suggested by someone else. In the first instance, the Smithian view, perhaps unwittingly, was introduced into Canadian economic historiography by Buckley's colleague at the University of Saskatchewan, Vernon Fowke.
Fowke had returned to questions asked by Innis and Mackintosh: How had Canadian economic development differed from that of the United States? Could the Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner be used to explain Canadian development? Mackintosh answered, yes, but not until 1896 on the Prairies. Innis answered, yes, if we consider a gathering stage frontier, rather than an agricultural frontier. Fowke answered, no, because the agricultural frontier in Canada was not homogenious and continuous, as Jackson had depicted the American frontier. Rather, it was recurring, heterogeneous, and interrupted by periods and regions dominated by resource gathering frontiers (Fowke, 1943).
This was as far as Fowke took the matter. Once the Fowkean paradigm is perceived however, other entailments of Canada's interrupted agricultural frontier become evident.
(2c) Agriculture, Economic Development, and Continental Integration
Adam Smith's assertion, that the institutions of land tenure in the British
colonies were the source of their greater success, draws attention to the
consequences for economic growth of the institutional differentiation of the
Canadian agricultural frontier. Agriculture was important. Most of the
population in the Canadas and, indeed, in colonial Martimes, were engaged in
agriculture. It was the institutionalization of agriculture, then, that set
paths and rates of growth, driving Canada's different regional economies
forward in distinctive ways. Further, these distinctive agricultural
frontiers, except before 1854 in francophone Quebec, and only with
qualifications in British Columbia, were northern extensions of the American
continental frontier. Agriculture in Canada cannot be understood apart from
the historical forces of continental integration.
This is not to say that these agricultual frontiers were carbon copies of the American frontier, projected north at different stages in its evolution. As in the Maritimes, northern extensions of the continental frontier were everywhere modified by geography and by the political exigencies of the Second and Third British Empires.
(2d) The Implications for Maritimes Economic Growth
In the Martimes the bastardization of New England tenure institutions by
the demands of Imperialism and relative scarcity of arable land set a pace
and structure of growth that required the region to link with other regions
of the continent to keep up, if laggingly, with global economic advance.
In other parts of Canada the continentalizing advance of agriculture was less
diluted by imperialism and enjoyed a more promising geography. Accordingly,
the most prosperous regions of the confederacy were linked early to the
general North American continental advance. In the late twentieth century
continental linkages were taken to new levels at different rates in different
regions. Cascadia and Atlantica are imaginings rooted in the realization
that both coastal regions need further linking with the general continental
advance if they are not to be left behind (5).
(3a) The Prairies
Before late twentieth century development of oil, gas, potash, and uranium
deposits, agriculture was the basis of economic development in the
Prairie region of Canada. Prairie agriculture appeared in the context of
transcontinental railways and the export of a narrow range of crops. It fitted
well into the Staple Paradigm, and could be seen as an element in the surge of
globalization associated with the New Imperialism of late nineteenth century
Europe. After all, despite its origins in the migration of technique, land
tenure institutions, and, indeed, even some settlers, from the United States,
Prairie agriculture grew on the emigration of capital and population from
Europe. Still, the nature of Prairie agricultural development is not clear.
A strong case for Prairie agriculture as an independent economic force in Canadian development cannot be made (Chambers and Gordon, 1966; Buckely, 1958; and Fowke, 1946). The case is undermined by heavy government subsidization of transportation in the wheat economy, both in the initial stages of development and subsequently. It is undermined by government supports in the marketing of western wheat and feed grains. The railroads that opened the Prairies were economic failures. There were farm failures. As early as 1913, provincial governments in the West found it necessary to declare moratoria on, or to subsidize, farm debt. Because the Prairies emerged from their early development as a have-not region, receiving large intergovernmental financial transfers, it seems fair to say that political integration in Canada was the substance of the western wheat economy, rather than that the western wheat economy was the substance of political integration. This is the important point underlying John Dales's comments about much short term and long term damage being done by government interference in the West. After the West was tied into the Chicago petroleum products market, and the potash market was continentalized, Alberta and, to some extent, Saskatchewan became independent generators of economic growth in Canada. But, Western agriculture, if not profitable, was at least viable. The political transcontinentalization of Canada in the late nineteenth century was given economic substance by a northern movement of the continental frontier.
(3b)Francophone Lower Canada
Agriculture provided the economic basis for the survival of francophone
Quebec. Initially seigneurial agriculture had a degree of dependence
on the fur trade. As a market for excess produce and labour the fur trade
supplied agriculture with specie for its associated marginal commercial
activities and for initial investment as settlement expanded. At the time of
the Conquest, however, only 4% of the colony's population was engaged in the
fur trade (6). More to the point, however, agriculture in francophone Quebec
was not export oriented. According to Paquet and Wallot (1969), even in the
first decades of the nineteenth century it was barely market oriented in any
sense. The fur trade's passing off to Hudson Bay had no effect on agriculture
in Quebec. The timber trade of the early nineteenth century had only a
marginal effect. In francophone Quebec the substance of economic activity was
largely independent of those primary product exports that were important in
the integration of the Canadian economy. Agriculture was the substance of the
economy, but francophone agriculture was not part of the sweep of the
continental agricultural frontier. Not until the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries did Quebec's reliance on the export of forest products,
aluminum, asbestos, and electicity continentalize its francophone economy.
(3c)Upper Canada
Following the American Revolution, Upper Canada became a politically alienated
extension of New England's agricultural frontier. In the initial
stages of settlement there were exports of timber, potash, wheat and
flour. They were a consequence not a cause of agricultural expansion. As a
possible source of capital for expansion, using a very generous basis for the
estimate, wheat and flour exports fell from about 50% of all possible sources
in 1806, to 20% of the total in 1851. As both Fowke (1946) and McCalla
(1978, 1992) have pointed out, wheat exports to Britain were important, but
they were not the substance of economic development in Upper Canada. Indeed,
according to Jones, Upper Canada was more closely linked in a number of ways
with the continental agricultural market supplying New York, Washington,
Philadelphia, and Pittsburg.
(3d)The Maritimes
Following the American Revolution, during the early indecision of the Second
British Empire, the Maritimes flourished. It was to replace New England in
the North Atlantic Trade. It had position. It had timber and ship building
capacity. It had commercial enterprise. It did not have a strong
agricultural base, and it did not have a future. The Second British Empire
eventually decided in favour of free trade, rendering the Maritimes
redudundant. The structure of North Atlantic trade shifted with the
advent of the sugar beet, of processes to refine deposits of mineral oil, of
the iron steam ship, and of the end of slavery. Coffee replaced tea.
American porcelain replaced British china. Silk lost out in competition with
North American textiles. Perhaps most of all, however, the Maritimes did
not have a connection with the great central plain of North America. Halifax
played Boston to Montreal's New York. New England and the Maritimes
experienced relative decline together as the New York Central and the Grand
Trunk extended west from ocean ports in other jurisdictions towards the
receding continental frontier.
(4a) Displacement of the Staple Thesis
The staple theory is not verified by
the substance of Canadian economic development. Some version of a staple
export theory may be verified by the development of some parts of Canada over
their entire histories. Certainly the development of Newfoundland and British
Columbia, and much of development in the Maritimes supports a staple export
theory. If qualified by an admission that its fundamental force was
political, not economic, a staple export theory is supported by
transcontinental elements in the development of all of Canada in the period
of the wheat economy in the West. But a staple theory is not verified by the
economic development of all of Canada over all of its history. Certainly,
a staple theory that assumes Canada to be homogeneous and linked to Europe by
staple exports falls far short of explanation. Continentalism and balanced
growth trump imperialism and staple export dependent growth in different
regions at different times, and in all of Canada at the end of times.
The place of the staple theory in Canadian historiography is assured. The process by which Europe was globalized to what is now Canada was assisted by the exploitation of primary products. A substantial element in the continentalization and regionalization of Canada has been and is associated with primary product exports. Still, The process by which land tenure institutions, banking institutions and currency, confederal government institutions, and subordination of Parliament to a bill of rights, farming and manufacturing techniques, multi national corporations, and a host of other practices and institutions have migrated north from the origninal British colonies and the United States cannot be explained in the context of the Staple Theory associated with Mackintosh and Innis's account of the spread of the price system of economic organization to Canada.
(4b) Agriculture and a Distinctive Regional Economies Hypothesis
Agriculture in the Maritimes was dominated by the land alienation and tenure
arrangments of the Second British Empire. Though born in the locally
controlled capitalism of New England, Maritime agriculture was shaped
by the Empire's post Revolutionary fear and indecision. In addition to the
deficiencies of arable land in the Maritimes, Imperial settlement policy
gave agriculture a worst possible start. According to Macdonald, Saunders,
Gwyn, and others, that made all the difference.
Agriculture in francophone Canada has its roots in the seigneurial system, that is in seventeenth century French feudalism. Because it was feudal, New France experienced a different path and a slower rate of growth than that experienced under the embryonically capitalist institutions of New England.
Agriculture in Upper Canada was established with the attenuated feudal institutions of New England. Indeed, Britain's reaction to the Revolution, and her desire to reward Loyalists, was the occasion of further attenuation of those institutions. Post Revolutionary settlement policy was different in Upper Canada. There was better farm land in the Eastern Townships and Upper Canada than in the Maritimes, but, in addition, there were no quit rents, even in principle, and the large grants to absentee favourites of the Imperial government that plagued the Maritimes were not a problem in the Canadas.
Institutions of land tenure progressed from feudalism through attenuated feudalism to virtual capitalism as one moved from fracophone Canada through the Maritimes to anglophone Canada; and it was anglophone Canada, the Montreal-Upper Canada economy, that developed into the confederacy's industrial and financial heartland.
Prairie settlement, as Chester Martin has pointed out, entailed explicit wholesale borrowing of the formally capitalistic land alienation and tenure institutions of post Civil War United States. Western agriculture, emerging in a fourth Canadian institutional context, exhibited yet another economic growth path, distinct from those of the Maritimes, Quebec, and Ontario.
(4c) The Conclusion of History: a Modified Continental Integration Thesis
Different institutions and values associated with agricultural and with common
property based exports, the two occurring intermittently across the history
and geography of the nation, have generated temporally and spatially
differentiated growth paths. Globalization in Canada, from the seventeenth
century on, has entailed a continuous restructuring and reorientation of the
economy, from which its present degree of continentalization and
regionalization have emerged.
(5a) Canals and Industrialization
In the last half of the eighteenth century, based on advances in
agriculture, England experienced the first Industrial Revolution.
Consequent demand for bulk transport produced the Canal Era. As the
Industrial Revolution spread, it produced a Canal Era in Europe, in
Russia, in the United States; and in one of Canada's regional
economies.
The Canal Era affected the British North American colonies unevenly. In the Maritimes canals were projected. They were never built. In Newfoundland they were not even projected. In Lower Canada (Canada East) canals were built on the trade route from Montreal to Vermont and New York. They were not built in relation to agriculture, commerce, and such manufacturing as there was in the seigneuries. Canal building in British North America took place largely to the west of Montreal. In that regional economy there was sufficient arable land, and there were appropriate capitalistic institutions. There was access to the information environment of industrialization in England and the United States. In fact, in its institutional and technical characteristics the development of Montreal-Canada West was an extension of developments in the United States. In that regional economy alone in British North America an adequate foundation was put down on which to undertake industrialization. In that region the Smithian stages paradigm best represents the process of economic development and growth.
The economic growth path of francophone Quebec was affected by this continental thrust at every stage, because Montreal, though the entrepot of Canada West, was politically in Canada East. And there were Imperial exigencies to which Montreal responded. In the early nineteenth century a crise d'agriculture, precipitated by francophone realization of the superiority of the agricultural system of the continental frontier, led to commutation of feudal tenure. Later increases in productivity were too late for "natural", Smithian development. Scots and Yankee provisioners of the Imperial army preempted the rise of capitalistic francophone commercial enterprise. In consequence, at the end of the nineteenth century, according to Robert Errol Bouchette, there was a noted faiblesse de la bourgeoisie francophone; and, at the end of the twentieth century, compensating for that weakness, there was a relatively heavy involvement of government in economic enterprise in Quebec.
(5b) The Automobile and Industrialization
Between 1890 and 1930, United States industry moved to world prominence on the
basis of hydro electric power and the internal combustion engine.
Manufacturing migrated from New England to the lower Great Lakes area.
Across the lakes in Canada a similar development occurred. In fact, westward
movement of the industrial frontier in America ignored the boundary between
Canada and the United States, just as westward movement of the agricultural
frontier had ignored it between 1800 and 1860, and between 1890 and 1910.
Once again, as Dales and Raynauld have shown, very long run factors associated
with this continental frontier differentiated the Montreal-Ontario economy
(increasingly the Toronto-Ontario economy) from the economy of francophone
Quebec.
Maritime manufacturing entered a prolonged period of relative decline in the Period of the Electric Dynamo and the Internal Combustion Engine. Quebec, including Montreal, experienced an increase in manufacturing activity in that period, but with emphasis on a different frontier from that of the Toronto-Ontario region. Montreal expanded in railway related activities during the last great thrust of railway imperialism, just before overexpansion and technical obsolescence drove the railways into bankruptcy. Other developments in Quebec were related to a supply of inexpensive labour migrating from relatively impoverished agricultural areas, and to expanding continental demand for natural resources. Ontario shared in the expansion of new, intracontinental resource exports, but in Ontario resource related activity was secondary to capital intensive manufacturing in iron and steel, automobiles, and electrical equipment and appliances.
In general, regionalization of the Canadian economy by the different technical and institutional characteristics of the Canal Era and the Railway Epoch was compounded by developments in the Internal Combustion and Electric Dynamo Period; because after 1920, a new wave of continental integration in the form of international corporations in manufacturing and services, again fostered regionalization by strengthening north-south trade flows, and inter-regional differences in industrial structure.
There are five relatively independent and structurally different economies in Canada. There are two common property resource exporting economies, British Columbia and Newfoundland. Both have an outward economic tendency. There are two modified common property resource exporting economies, the Prairies and the Maritimes. In these there is an agriculutral base, but again, both have an outward economic tendency. There are two economies the substance of which is a form of balanced growth: manufacturing and agriculture, but with a significant reliance on the export of renewable and non renewable resources. These are Ontario and Quebec. Again, their economic tendency is away from the Confederation. In every case the outward tendency increasingly integrates these different economies with the rest of the North American Economy.
For the Maritimes this has meant turning away from a vain effort to integrate
with a transcontinental economy that, in any case, is disintegrating. It has
meant turning towards a natural metropolitan center in North Eastern United
States. The regionalization of Canada and its continentalization under the
historical forces of twentieth century globalization have drawn the path
and rate of Maritime growth into the influence of metropolitan centers to the
south, and away from centers to the west.
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(2) See "The Teaching of Economic History in Canada", in Essays in Canadian Economic History (M.Q. Innis, ed.) University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1956, p. 12. Innis's contribution can be called the Staple Theory of Canadian Economic Development. Fowke's contribution can be called the Distinctive Regional Economies Hypothesis. Neither historian used these labels, however, and filling in qualifications and details is necessary when attributing them to the two. Further, attributing Innis's "theory" to S.A. Saunders, or Fowke's hypothesis to Bartlett Brebner, A.H. Clark, J. Gwyn, G. Wynn, and Margaret Conrad is "heroic", but that attribution provides the basis for a viable historical construction of the current position of the Maritimes.
(3) This "snap shot" depiction of Innis's and Mackintosh's accounts is hard to perceive in the rubble of subsequent revisions of their positions. During the early years of the Cold War, M.H. Watkins packaged the Staple Theory in A.O. Hirschman's paradigm of Third World development. In the information environment of the Viet Nam War, he repackaged it in a Western Marxian Theory of the Staple Trap. W.A. Mackintosh, after he had become a Keynesian, recast his historical account in the short run categories of macroeconomic theory. With the decline of Keynesianism and the rise of formalism in Economics, Richard Caves produced a Neoclassical version of the Staple Theory that Chambers and Gordon attacked and Urquhart and Green defended.
(4)When Harold Innis looked back to the very long run factors integrating the Canadian economy he saw a different sequence of stages. He saw commercial stage activities in Britain associated with gathering stage activities in Canada. In his view, commerce preceded agriculture and manufacturing, which appeared, then, as a forward or backward linkage from staple exports. Of course, he did not use these terms, but his revision of Smith was explicit, and its intent cannotbe doubted. (See. "Economic Factors in Canadian Economic Development" etc.) Dependency theorists of the 1970s, relying on Innis's basic assertion, constructed a paradigm in which Canada was permanently dependent on staple exports, and the Maritimes was permanently, if unfortunately, dependent on Canada in an initial Bastard-Smithian stage of development.
(5) It is hardly surprising that in this construction the Maritimes finds its natural metropolis in New England, and its linkage to the global economy lying in that direction. But, after all, the staple theory was developed with a focus on other regions of Canada, and did not take into account the role of agriculture anywhere except on the Prairies. While this might have been evident from the nature of the theory, full realization took considerable detailed analysis.
First came E.R. Forbes realization that S.A. Saunder's account of Maritime development was flawed. This realization entailed an attempt to show that Confederation had not been an unmixed blessing for the region. This, in turn, was followed by some attempt to show that a theory of the staple trap, rather than a staple theory was the appropriate paradigm. Then, finally, came R.S. Sager's realization that even the staple trap view was historically insupportable, and Jullian Gwynn, Margaret Conrad, and Marilyn Gerriet's turning to the independent role of agriculture in Maritime economic development.
(6) Eccles criticism of Innis on this point is well founded.
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