History
The first premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, Joey Smallwood, coined the term "Atlantic Canada" when Newfoundland and Labrador joined the Canadian Confederation (the Commonwealth of Canada) in 1949. He believed that it would have been presumptuous for Newfoundland and Labrador to assume that it could include itself within the existing term "Maritime Provinces", used to describe the cultural similarities shared by New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. The three Maritime provinces joined Confederation during the 19th century: New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were founding members of the Canadian Confederation in 1867, and Prince Edward Island joined in 1873.
Smallwood and others have excluded Quebec from Atlantic Canada because of Quebec's dramatically different culture. This is despite the fact that Quebec has physical Atlantic coasts on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Ungava Bay, and the Hudson Strait.
Read more about this topic: Atlantic Canada
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“At present cats have more purchasing power and influence than the poor of this planet. Accidents of geography and colonial history should no longer determine who gets the fish.”
—Derek Wall (b. 1965)
“Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)