Economic Life

Before 1755 the economic development of Acadia was based upon the fur trade, the fisheries, agriculture, lumber, and general commerce. The relative significance of each section of the economy altered as generations succeeded one another, fur and fish being more important in the seventeenth century and agriculture and commerce during the eighteenth. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been marked in the region by the continuation of the economic pursuits of the past and the emergence of an industrial sector.

By the late seventeenth century, much Acadian trade was with Massachusetts. Viewed as smuggling in the eyes of the French authorities, this trade continued after 1713 but was then supplemented by commercial exchanges that the English authorities, in their turn, regarded in the same light. In 1740 a list of Acadian exports to Louisbourg was valued at 26,940 livres and included furs to the value of 5,500 livres, nearly 14,000 livres of livestock, and 7,000 livres of flour and other foods. New England exports to Louisbourg for the same year were valued at 48,447 livres. Pursuing a mixed economy – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s picture of placid yokels in his epic poem Evangeline has little historical validity – the Acadians were as capable of exploiting the forests and the seas as they were of farming the land and engaging in trade. Agriculture was so successful that the colony was self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs by the 1680s, an achievement that was largely attributable to the Acadians’ ability to farm salt-marshes through building a complex system of dykes.

The dykes themselves, built in the estuary lands of almost all areas that the Acadians had settled but particularly in the Annapolis, Minas, and Cumberland basins, were considerable feats of engineering. Most were at least 3 metres thick at the bottom, rose almost two metres high, and at the top were usually at least a metre wide. By the 1740s many were much larger. We have an account of the construction of a major dyke in the region of Memramcook in 1775. There was a workforce of 58 men and they worked 12 days straight, days of something between 12 and 17 hours. Many of the workers brought their own teams of horse or oxen. The final dyke was 13.5 metres wide at its base, 7.2 metres high, and 59 metres long.

Once built, constant surveillance was required to ensure that any weakening of these barriers against the sea was immediately repaired. Where a dyke crossed lands owned by a number of proprietors, someone was named as the sourd du marais and made responsible for overseeing its upkeep. Of course, the dykes were only part of the story of salt-marsh farming: the other part was the aboiteaux, clapper-valve gates that allowed fresh water out but prevented salt water coming in. Such systems were commonplace in early-seventeenth-century Holland, and France had started building them at about the same time. In 1639 King Louis XIII commissioned one Pierre Siette of La Rochelle, for a period of some twenty years, to drain the marshes and flooded lands of Aunis, Poitou, and Saintonge. Four years earlier, in 1635, colonists who knew something about farming estuaries were specifically sought out for Acadia and their skills recorded in their contracts of migration. The workmanship of those who built the aboiteaux was of very high quality and the drainage system that resulted was so effective that it usually took no more than three years for the land to be desalinated. By 1750 Acadia’s dyked lands covered more than 5,000 hectares: 1,250 hectares at Annapolis, 1,660 hectares at Minas proper, 1,040 hectares in the regions of Pisiquid (Windsor) and Cobequid, and 1,250 in Chignecto. Together, these lands supported 17,750 cattle, 26,650 sheep, 12,750 swine, and some 1,600 horses.

After 1764 the Acadians’ economic life in the Maritimes was determined by their political and social position within the larger anglophone society of which they now formed a part and by the place of that society within the North American economic context. Variation arose from the particular situation of different Acadian settlements. In Nova Scotia the returning Acadians of la Baie Française, Clare municipality in Digby County, structured an economy around fishing, forestry, and subsistence agriculture. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, commerce was mostly a matter of barter with the merchants of Saint John across the Bay of Fundy, fish, lumber, and farm products being exchanged for molasses, sugar, and tools as well as household goods. By the middle of the nineteenth century, lumber had assumed major importance for the community but by the early 1900s, with the development of motorboats and refrigeration techniques, commercial fishing had supplanted it.

The economic life of both Îsle Madame and Cheticamp was much less diversified, the settlements relying almost entirely on the fishing industry with a minimum of subsistence agriculture. This meant dependence on entrepreneurs from Jersey such as the Robin and Janvrin families. The Robins, under various names – Philippe Robin and Company, Charles Robin and Company, Charles Robin, Collas, and Company – virtually controlled the buying, selling and processing of fish in these areas. Until the early twentieth century, Jersey companies enforced the truck system: rarely paying the fishermen cash but insisting that they buy at the company store to the value of their fish. The bitterness this engendered was in large measure responsible for the development of a strong cooperative movement in the region. In 1915 eight fishermen organized themselves to deliver their own catch directly to Halifax and Charlottetown. This step, and the formation of other cooperatives, was encouraged in the 1930s by Father Moses Michael Coady’s Antigonish movement, the creation of which had followed the report of a royal commission on the fisheries in 1928.

Fishing and lumber were also the principal activities of those Acadians who established themselves along the New Brunswick coast, from Cap-Pelé to Caraquet. Again, the Jersey merchants played a significant role in the economy of the region, particularly before Confederation. One sector where Acadians exercised some control was lobster fishing, which became an important part of the Atlantic fishery following the development of lobster canning in the 1850s; a number of small family firms specializing in this fishery emerged along the coastline between Shediac and Cap-Pelé. In another region, Acadian labourers, factory workers, shopkeepers, educators, lawyers, doctors, and businessmen were drawn to the new town of Moncton, which dates to the mid-1850s but did not experience significant growth until the 1860s. The expansion of Acadian settlement in the north of New Brunswick was primarily the result of the lumber industry, especially with the advent of railway building in the area after 1872. Between 1915 and 1930 the founding of paper mills in Bathurst and Edmundston brought the Acadians the possibility of industrial employment but ownership of the mills themselves was in the hands of anglophone entrepreneurs. Agriculture continued to play its part, especially with the development of potato farming in the Grand Falls region. Finally, on the coast, the city of Bathurst has been the centre for a mining industry since the discovery of base metal deposits in the region in 1953. The area has 40 percent of Canada’s known reserves of silver, lead, and zinc and its mines process 10,000 tonnes of ore daily. Again, capital investment by francophones has been less important in these projects than that of anglophones.

By the end of World War I, the Acadian population of the Maritimes was clearly integrated within the general economic life of the region. Integration, however, did not always mean participation on an equal footing with the majority, nor did it mean participation in a precisely similar manner. To a much greater extent than was the case for the anglophone majority, Acadian economic development long revolved around rural life. Another difference between the two groups was Acadians’ greater support for cooperative movements, which underlay not only commercial and industrial ventures but also credit unions, les caisses populaires. In 1985 the Acadian credit unions had assets of $485 million and some 180,000 members. The major Acadian financial institution, La Societé Assomption, was founded in Massachusetts in 1903 as a mutual-benefit society and by 1907 had thirty-eight branches within Acadian communities. Its membership played an important role in the Acadian National Convention of 1908. In 1913 it moved its headquarters to Moncton, and in 1969 it became exclusively a mutual-insurance company.

Overall, the Acadian population of the Maritimes in the 1980s was in a less advantageous position than that enjoyed by the anglophone majority, earning wages that were 73 percent of the Canadian average as opposed to the 88 percent earned by the latter. The general employment picture reflects a similar divergence: 59 percent of Acadians were in the workforce in 1986; the figure was 63 percent for anglophones and the overall Canadian average was 67 percent. Or to put it another way: unemployment tends to be almost twice the Canadian average in those areas of the Maritimes which are primarily francophone.

The position of Maritime women, both francophone and anglophone, is less favourable than that of the men. In 1979 New Brunswick men earned, on average, precisely twice the wages of New Brunswick women. In 1981, 44 percent of New Brunswick women were in the workforce, compared with 51.6 percent of women at the national level. Most of these women were in service industries and very few were unionized. As late 1976, only 23.5 percent of francophone women in the Maritimes had completed grade nine, whereas 44.8 percent of anglophone women had done so. To a large extent, Acadian women have worked within the service industries and in the traditional female occupations of teaching and nursing. Nevertheless, Acadian women have also made major gains in business and in recent years a small number of them have gained prominence in the media, the professions of law and medicine, and the civil service. A few examples of influential Acadian women are Lise Ouellette, who served as coordinator of the Federation des Cultivateurs in northeastern New Brunswick, Laetitia Cyr-Theriault, who became the first female director of Societé Radio-Canada for the Atlantic region in 1978, and Muriel Roy, a professor of sociology at the Université de Moncton.

Currently, francophone economic life in the Maritime provinces is as variable a matter as anywhere else in Canada. An economic disaster for francophones and anglophones alike has been the collapse of the cod fishery. Nothing can compensate for the economic hardship occasioned by this development, but the federal government’s relocation of some of its operations to Atlantic Canada – Veteran Affairs to Charlottetown, Citizenship to Sydney, Canada Post to Antigonish, and Revenue Canada to Summerside, P.E.I. – has helped to increase employment in the region. In New Brunswick, Bathurst has seen the establishment of federal-government offices concerned with unemployment insurance, and, similarly, Shediac has acquired services relating to the Canada Pension Plan. Provincial-government activity has also been important for both linguistic groups in the Maritimes. In New Brunswick alone, the number of employees in health and education rose from 30,000 in 1975 to 50,000 in 1986, an increase of 66 percent; the total increase in employment for the province during these same years was 19 percent (a mere 11 percent if health and education are excluded). Acadians have also benefited from the fact that federal-employment policies stress the need for a bilingual workforce. Given the current emphasis, at all levels of government, on reducing the size of the civil service, the extent to which the public sector will continue to be an economic mainstay for the Acadian population is a matter for conjecture.

Fortunately, however, there are also signs of private-sector growth. Since 1991 the presence of a bilingual workforce in the Bathurst and Moncton areas has led to the creation there of more than 2,000 telecommunication jobs. Le Conseil Économique du Nouveau Brunswick had 1,500 members in 1995. The crab and shrimp fisheries, both controlled by Acadians, are proving to be viable enterprises for villages from Caraquet to Shediac; in 1995 crab production was worth about $66 million a year and shrimp production about $14 million. Lobsters harvested in the Acadian regions of the Maritimes form the basis of another $20-million-per-year industry.

As is true for the rest of Canada, the impact of the free-trade agreement between Canada and the United States has had a mixed impact upon Acadian communities. There is no doubt that small businesses have been adversely affected and a number of small factories, such as the glove and shoe enterprises in Edmundston, have been shut down. Whether access to the larger continental market, for such enterprises as do survive, will be sufficient compensation for these losses is still unclear. Given that, between 1979 and 1988, small businesses accounted for 81 percent of new employment opportunities, there is concern that the impact of cheaper American products will damage this sector.