Volume 25, 2022

EN :

Drawing on Halifax customs house reports, Tillotson reveals in broad terms the extent to which, between 1789 and 1835, the public revenue of the Province of Nova Scotia was drawn from taxes on imported goods that had been produced by the harshly exploited labour of enslaved people in the plantations of the greater Caribbean. With trade taxes generating two-thirds of the provincial revenue and the major customs port, Halifax, collecting between 38 percent and 73 percent of its trade taxes on slave-made goods, she argues that, in all of the areas where the Province spent on public goods, Nova Scotians benefitted substantially from a revenue that derived from the labour of enslaved people. One kind of benefit was the funding of economic infrastructure. The other was the payment of salaries to professional men who did government work. In the latter case, she shows, government work often had a social control element, one that reproduced in Nova Scotia the racialized hierarchy of the plantation world. The ideal of independent farming and fishing, one of the touchstones of settler economic life, counted for little against the commitment these professional men showed to the white supremacist culture that defended plantation society.

EN :

One of the most technically advanced, fully integrated steel companies in Canada, the Nova Scotia Steel Company, began as Hope Iron Works, established in 1872 by Graham Fraser and Forrest McKay, two New Glasgow metal workers, with a small investment. In 1882, in response to the 1879 National Policy, Hope was incorporated into a new company with a board consisting mostly of New Glasgow merchants and entrepreneurs and John F. Stairs of Halifax. The Stairs' role in the development of “Scotia,” as it was called, has either been downplayed or largely ignored.

From careful beginnings, the new company made rapid progress, installing new machinery and adding many new products. By the summer of 1901 the Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Co. was brimming with optimism and set about the task of becoming a fully integrated steel company. What had begun as a $4,000 investment in 1872 by two New Glasgow visionaries with their eight employees had become, by Nova Scotia standards, an industrial colossus with $4.5 million in assets and well over 1,500 employees at three locations, a triumph of inter-regional cooperation. The process of growth of this industrial giant from such humble beginnings is a tale of Maritime high finance in the era of the National Policy.

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In the nineteenth century, many regions of Canada faced a crisis that sometimes seemed existential: uneven economic growth resulted in sustained emigration to the United States. Far from being unique to French Canadians in the St. Lawrence River valley, whose story is better known, the exodus touched Nova Scotia and intersected with debates over industrialization and federal-provincial relations. Everywhere the issue posed a challenge to elected officials. However, diagnosing the problem differently and wielding a variety of policy tools, these officials could not agree on means of generating opportunities comparable to those of the US Northeast. Whereas Quebec recommitted itself to an agrarian vision of domestic colonization, a vigorous critique of Confederation emerged in Nova Scotia. The debates in these two provinces should inspire scholars to study emigration as the foremost national challenge of the late nineteenth century and integrate historical voices who exemplify the many political paths available to Canadian electors.

EN :

The subject of this article is the federal Liberal politician who became one of Canada’s biggest businessmen of the 1960s, only to renounce it to return to politics. Twice an MP and twice a Cabinet minister, Robert Winters (1910–1969) failed, by a mere 249 votes, to defeat Pierre Trudeau at the Liberal leadership convention in April 1968. As such, he is an exceptional “might-have-been” of Canadian political history. Had he succeeded, he would have been the first Liberal prime minister from Atlantic Canada, and the first business executive to become leader of the Liberal Party. Despite his prominence and importance, little of substance has been written about Winters.