Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
One thing I have noticed living in places outside of Atlantic Canada is how much less jealousy and parochial competition there is. The Maritimes can have (or had, when I was there more, back in the 2000's) an almost unhinged dynamic between a small city and almost inconsequential suburbs and there's a lot of jealousy between smaller and bigger cities. I don't see it to anywhere near the same level in Ontario, BC, Western Canada, etc. Around here you don't see people in Kelowna or Nanaimo or Calgary ranting about Vancouver much at all. Or people in North Van or Burnaby complaining about the city so much and going on about their distinctive identity.
I wonder if a part of it is the relatively large role of governments and the sense that economic activity is given by a higher authority rather than grown organically. The Maritimes also have much older and larger small towns and rural populations relative to the size of the cities, and rural people often set the agenda at the provincial level. There's almost no economic growth in the rural areas and there's an almost toxic relationship where the rural areas resent the cities but rely on them heavily to subsidize services.
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I think some of it is that while no part of the country has a lot of high growth small towns (that aren't in commuter sheds), the Maritimes has a lot of slowly shrinking small towns. And much of the shrinkage comes in the form of people and jobs moving to larger places. It isn't just stuff closing and ceasing to exist, but rather some things that did exist moving to other places. So while it may be true that cities subsidize the small towns, it doesn't feel that way. It feels like the small towns are subsidizing the cities by the cities slowly leeching away all the people and jobs. It's one of those cases where the intuition and the reality are quite different.
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