The following is an excerpt from Mark McLaughlan’s review of Against the Tides: Reshaping Landscape and Community in Canada’s Maritime Marshlands that was published in the latest issue of Acadiensis. To read the full article please click here and subscribe.
IN THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 2023, the Isthmus of Chignecto, the land link between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, became a hotly debated political topic. The Canadian federal government urged New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to apply for disaster mitigation and adaptation funds by a deadline of 19 July to help pay for protecting transportation and communication infrastructure on the isthmus against climate change-related sea rise. Taking about 15 years to complete, the project would involve raising the height of 35 kilometres of existing dykes and building new ones. The provinces’ position was that the funds would only cover half of the estimated $301 million needed, whereas they wanted the federal government to assume most of the costs. After a lot of back and forth, the provinces reluctantly agreed to apply for the funding one day before the deadline. The New Brunswick and Nova Scotia governments, however, pledged to take the matter to court to get most of the project covered by federal funds, which had by then ballooned to an estimated cost of $650 million.[1]
This future project will continue a long tradition of human modification within the Maritime marshlands. Indigenous peoples had relied on the marshlands in the Bay of Fundy region since time immemorial, but it was the French-speaking Acadians in the 17th and 18th centuries who shaped this space where lands meet sea essentially into what occupies the present-day settler imagination. The Acadians turned marshland into dykeland – very productive agricultural land that helped sustain their society for more than a century. After the Expulsion of the Acadians in the mid-18th century, British settlers moved in and maintained the dykes for another century-and-a- half. By the 1920s and 1930s, changes within the agricultural economy made it harder for local farmers to maintain the dykes, and so the federal and provincial governments stepped in for the first time. Federal legislation created the Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration (MMRA), and throughout the mid-20th century the MMRA reconstructed dykes and built dams all around the Bay of Fundy region. Despite the dykes’ central role in the history of the area, very little has been written on the history of the MMRA.
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