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:
“A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.”
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“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)