Never the Twain did Meet: Prairie‐Maritime Relations, 1910–27

Abstract

IN THEIR PREOCCUPATION with Central Canada, Prairie and Maritime historians have had little to say of their regions' relations with each other. Yet, especially in the early decades of the twentieth century, these were significant. The three Maritime and the three Prairie provinces had important interests in common. As provinces with relatively small populations and narrow tax bases, each had a stake in breaking from the rigid per capita subsidy formula imposed at Confederation and guarded thereafter by gargantuan Ontario. Distant from the principal centres of population and acutely concerned with the maintenance of a cheap and efficient service for railway users, each had to fight demands for greater profits or reduced deficits on the railways. Nevertheless, in the interregional jockeying in the formation of national policy on these and other issues, the Prairies and Maritimes seldom appeared as allies. Where they seemed to have the most in common, they were often in sharpest conflict. In i9i 7 a Westerner attacked the low rates on the Intercolonial. Five years later a Maritimer led the opposition to the maintenance of the Crow's Nest Pass rates. The Maritimers fought the Prairie subsidy claims of 1918 and Westerners opposed the implementation of the Duncan Commission rec-