Well, Atlantic Canadians certainly live in interesting times.
President Donald Trump is turning global geopolitics into a much-watched Game Show. Global stock markets boil and roil in his wake.
The major Western defence alliance (NATO) appears to be crumbling. The US has become an enemy of foreign aid. Its Secretary of Health, Robert Kennedy, is an anti-vaxxer. Its government restraint commando, Elon Musk, took to social media to challenge the Trump tariffs… And on and on it goes.
Back home in Atlantic Canada, we face a looming recession as we live our daily lives and earn our daily bread in the weakest-performing economies in the nation.
This is hardly a new or novel situation for the region.
As historian James Struthers put it, in an essay on the impact of the Great Depression of the 1930s. “The Maritimes had already entered into a severe economic decline in the 1920s, and had less distance to fall” (than the rest of Canada).
Today, there are rays of hope shining through the haze at our very own Ground Zero.
In Saint John, said to be the Canadian city most vulnerable to new US tariffs, the Irving oil refinery and its employees have been spared from tariff misery.
Say what you will about President Trump, but he clearly understood the political calculus of exempting bitumen-based petroleum from Alberta and Saskatchewan, and refined fuel products, from import levies.
Keeping gas prices low is good politics in the US, whose citizens drive a lot, almost as often and as far as Canadians. (Yep, we beat the Americans when it comes to hockey and gas guzzling.)
The bigger opportunity for Atlantic Canada is linked to the massive cuts in university and research funding that President Trump is implementing in the United States.
This could confer what economists call a “comparative advantage” on this region’s ocean technology, life sciences and renewable energy sectors. All three industries are moving forward, but seemingly in geological time, (We seem to have a surfeit of brilliant research scientists and engineering know-how in these areas, along with a lingering failure to commercialize that brain power and that research.)
Well, guess what? More top researchers are already heading north from what they consider to be hostile territory. The capital investment will follow if our governments get it right, and Canada’s corporate leaders open their cash-rich wallets and risk some money on a better future.
Here in Atlantic Canada, we can take some comfort from the policies being promoted by both Liberal Leader Mark Carney and the Conservative party’s Pierre Poilievre. Both promise to fast-track Canada’s regulatory regime for big projects. Next step, the smart people say, is getting the taxation system right to incentivize project development and the commercialization of research.
History might also guide us to a better future for the region. In the wake of the Great Depression, Atlantic Canada – then Maritime Canada – was dragged forward first by the World War Two economy, and then by massive infrastructure spending on roads and rural electrification. (The third pillar in this holy trinity was modernizing educational systems.)
Spare us from another war economy, please, but governments really could help us move forward by providing financial support to improve transportation infrastructure. Job one is completion of a secure route through the Isthmus of Chignecto, which connects New Brunswick with Nova Scotia but is measurably sinking into nearby seas.
Also high on the list is the region’s ferry system, which is most often in the news due to cancelled voyages or inoperable ships. We can’t sustain our economy, let alone grow in, if you can’t get here from there, can’t deliver food to the region’s two island provinces, and can’t take away exports on return trips to the rest of the world.
In short, we have to get the get the fundamentals right, in what will become the new world order.
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