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Originally Posted by isaidso
In all fairness, the Maritimes has historically been more rural than other regions of Canada. For decades, rural areas have seen next to no population growth while a number of urban areas have shown steady growth.
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It depends on the period but I agree this was true for a lot of the 20th century. Before then, the Maritimes were generally more urbanized/industrialized. Although even in the 50's and 60's Halifax wasn't much smaller than say Calgary. There really was Montreal, Toronto, and then everywhere else. If you read old Canadian national media, the rural Maritimes trope didn't really get going until maybe the 70's and 80's, by which time the economy of the Maritimes was in the doldrums and they got conflated with Newfoundland.
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45% may live in Halifax but it's also true that Nova Scotia is dotted with small towns. The latter isn't necessarily a bad thing though. Due to the small geographic size of the province, you're never all that far from an urban area.
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This is along the lines of what I was getting at. A lot of the population of NS is within the influence of some metro area, whether it's Halifax or Sydney. The actual "remote" population is quite small and in NS it's basically physically impossible to hit the level of remoteness possible in every other province except PEI.
I think there was (maybe it's dying away now) a pretty big disconnect between the popular national or even "self" image of NS and how it truly worked. It was mostly small industrialized towns (based partly on industries like textile and steel mills, tire plants, etc.) with access to railways/highways, plus some university towns. Fishing villages or "outports" exist but are a smaller proportion than in NL and NS isn't physically large enough to have villages 10 hours away from the city.
In NS, the quasi-rural counties are places like Hants and Kings, which definitely have farms and a rural economic base but are tied to the city. The feel is similar to around say Guelph or Kitchener in Ontario. Then on top of that there's a bigger mix of exurban development with in many cases professionals living in expensive waterfront large lot subdivisions. We can debate what of that counts as rural but it's very different from say a stereotypical Depression era subsistence homestead or an outport.