Maritime Union

Maritime Union is a proposed political union of the three Maritime provinces of Canada – New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island – to form a single new province. This vision has sometimes been expanded to a proposed Atlantic Union, which would also include the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

The idea has been proposed at various times throughout Canadian history. Most recently, it was reintroduced in November 2012 by Stephen Greene, John D. Wallace and Mike Duffy, three Conservative Senators from the region. As of 2012, a union of the three Maritime provinces would have a population of approximately 1.8 million, becoming the fifth largest Canadian province by population.

The Maritime provinces already cooperate to jointly provide some government services, especially in the areas of purchase and procurement.

Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick were administered as parts of Nova Scotia, until 1769 and 1784, respectively. The region, at the time of French colonisation, was referred to in its entirety as Acadia. After Acadia fell to the British, following the Seven Years' War (what is today known as the Nova Scotia peninsula had been in British possession post-1713), the entire region was amalgamated into a single colony named Nova Scotia.

During the 1760s, the British split St. John's Island (the present-day Prince Edward Island) into a separate colony, only to merge it again with Nova Scotia several years later. By the 1780s, with the influx of Loyalist refugees from the American Revolutionary War, the disparate geographic regions that comprised Nova Scotia were again split into separate colonies. St. John's Island, New Brunswick and Cape Breton Island all received autonomy with their respective colonial administrations and capitals.

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