New Brunswick covers 73, square kilometres. The total population was , people census and there are 8 cities. Thanks to those who have followed and supported us. We are non-profit and self-fund our travels with donations from supporting businesses and campgrounds. Our mission is to show you that New Brunswick is rich in history and there is a lot to see and do in our province if you leave the main highway, and explore.
Explore legends, lore and family roots in New Brunswick. In , refugees loyal to the British Crown began to land at the mouth of the St. John River in what was then part of the Province of Nova Scotia. They were fleeing from persecution in the aftermath of the American Revolution and came from as far south as Georgia and as far north as Massachusetts.
The Black Loyalists included a number of freed slaves, but there were a small number of loyalists who brought their slaves with them to New Brunswick. Discontentment with the government in Halifax led to the establishment of the areas north of the Bay of Fundy as the new Province of New Brunswick in By , so many refugees had landed and settled at the mouth of the St. The capital was established at Fredericton, km up the St.
John River. Scottish and Irish settlers began to settle in New Brunswick in the early s. An extensive river system brought access well into the interior of the province, permitting early development of the and dictating patterns of settlement. The largest cities are located on the rivers, as are most of the towns and villages. Lakes are common in the south, with the largest, Grand Lake, more than 30 km in length. See also Geography of New Brunswick. Moncton has long been a headquarters for transportation and distribution facilities.
As a leading centre of British North America in the midth century, Saint John owes its importance to the timber trade made accessible by its river and to its ice-free port, which supplied the estuary and dominated shipping and shipbuilding on the Bay of Fundy. The trend to urbanization changed New Brunswick from more than two-thirds rural before to predominantly urban by Then came a reversal as the officially designated urban population dropped from 52 per cent in to 48 per cent in , owing to a resumption of migration from the region as well as a residential move to the suburbs, which had been made attractive by improved services, cheaper land and lower taxes.
In , the population was ,, 49 per cent of which was urban. Traditionally, young New Brunswickers have migrated to other provinces to find employment. This trend has persisted over the years. In , Statistics Canada noted many of those who migrate settle permanently in their new province of choice. In , the sectors employing the most people were health care and social assistance, retail, and public administration. Historically, New Brunswick has had a higher than national average unemployment rate.
In , the unemployment rate was The population of French origin grew dramatically after Confederation , from about 16 per cent in to 24 per cent in and 34 per cent in Other ethnic groups in included English 29 per cent , Irish 35 per cent and Scots 14 per cent. In , the most commonly reported ethnic origins in New Brunswick were Canadian, English and French. At about 65 per cent, the majority of New Brunswickers reported English as their mother tongue in , followed by 32 per cent who reported French.
From the early 16th century, they developed contacts with the Europeans and established a trade, which made them dependent on European technologies and victims of European diseases. After an extensive career in trade and fisheries along the coast of Acadia , Denys returned to Nepisiguit in to write a historically important description of Acadia before returning to France in to have the volume published.
The French launched raids against New England from the Saint John River valley in the s, helping to create a deep-seated and persistent hostility to the French presence in Acadia. Meanwhile the tiny settlement begun at Port-Royal flourished, spreading around the Bay of Fundy to include the Chignecto Isthmus and Shepody on the north shore. The Acadians developed a unique society characterized by dyking technology which enabled them to farm the marshes left by the Bay of Fundy's tides.
Their society was also characterized by neglect from the French authorities, and this encouraged the development of a tightly knit and independent community. Caught in an imperial struggle between British and French, most were expelled by the British in or later and scattered throughout the Thirteen Colonies or were returned to France. Those who returned after the Treaty of Paris , found their lands occupied by several thousand immigrants, largely from New England.
A few penetrated other parts of the province. Hungry for jobs and conscious of their isolation from Halifax , they petitioned for separate colonial status, which was granted in Napoleon's continental blockade, which in cut Britain off from traditional timber supplies from the Baltic region, led to a deliberate effort through protective timber tariffs to foster the colonial industry as a dependable source.
Blessed with rivers, which made rich stands of spruce and pine accessible, New Brunswick's squared-timber trade boomed for half a century. Timber became a source of development leading to new settlement and giving its own peculiar cast to the economy, and to politics and society. Population grew from perhaps 25, to almost , by mid-century.
Booms and slumps tended to bankrupt settlers who relied on timber, and many settlers were reduced to wage labour status, dependent on a few influential entrepreneurs in each region. Associated with the timber industry was wooden shipbuilding, for which production sites dotted the coast and rivers of the province, and by mid-century turned out over vessels a year, both for export and for the use of the merchants of Saint John.
New Brunswick industries, helped by the Crimean War and American Civil War , and by a reciprocity treaty with the US in natural products, weathered the crisis of the British abandonment of the timber tariffs and Navigation Acts in the late s. The conjunction of blows which afflicted New Brunswick's economy after Confederation , of which the National Policy of protective tariffs was but one, proved more permanently damaging. The reciprocity treaty was cancelled, timber resources became less merchantable and the wooden vessels lost in their competition with steam-driven, iron-hulled ships.
New Brunswickers by the thousand left the declining ports and timber towns to find employment in the US. See also New Brunswick and Confederation. Some New Brunswick entrepreneurs were quick to make the transition to a national continental economy.
Merchants, lumbermen and shipbuilders tended to transfer their capital to iron foundries, textile mills, sugar refineries and other secondary industries whose growth was fostered by the tariff.
Eventually many of the new industries, scattered through the province, were taken over by the larger and better capitalized industries of central Canada. The classic pattern emerged of takeover, failure to modernize, closure and the exploitation of the market from expanding plants in central Canada. The postwar recession of the s saw the continued decline of traditional industries, and the virtual collapse of a manufacturing sector further undercut by adverse federal policies in tariffs and transportation.
Investigation of Maritime problems by a federal royal commission and attempted remedial action were largely negated as New Brunswick plunged with the rest of the world into the Depression of the s. Several decades of economic stagnation reduced New Brunswick to a standard of living much lower than the national average.
National policies served to increase the disparity, as the tariff created and maintained a manufacturing sector in central Canada. Meanwhile, Maritime governments lacked the money to maintain essential services. By , New Brunswick's expenditures on education and health services were slightly over half of the national average; its illiteracy and infant mortality rates were the highest in the country.
Despite the recognition of the Rowell-Sirois Report on Dominion-Provincial Relations stating the need for a fairer distribution of the tax revenues from a national economy, the adjustment grants, which the commissioners recommended for the poorer provinces, were not adopted until the early s. The nature of New Brunswick's disparity was two-fold: the extreme disparity of standards of living compared with other provinces; and the internal disparity between the urban sections of the largely English south and the rural sections of the largely French north.
The attack on both proceeded simultaneously. Within the province, the government moved behind a slogan of "equal opportunity " to provide greater equality in services.
Acting on the recommendations of the Byrne Commission, the Robichaud administration, led by the first Acadian premier, proceeded with more than pieces of legislation to radically alter the division in responsibilities between provincial and county or municipal units of government.
Acting on the principle that the provincial government should maintain services to people, the government took responsibility for educational, medical, judicial and social assistance services. To the municipalities it gave services such as water, sewer, fire protection and local police services. Taxes were to be assessed province-wide on the actual market value of property. Along with the rationalization in services went a determined effort at economic development. The optimism of the s persuaded both federal and provincial governments that the chronic disparity of province and region could be overcome through industrialization.
Federal-provincial attempts at rural development, government investments in electricity generation, mining , forestry , fishery and secondary manufacturing, the building of major highways through the north of the province, and the use of transportation subsidies to help New Brunswick products reach national markets were all part of a federal-provincial effort to push the province's standard of living closer to the national average. Since the early 19th century, timber has dominated the New Brunswick economy.
The province, like the Maritime region as a whole, underwent severe economic dislocation in the latter half of the 19th century as a declining shipbuilding industry, stagnant timber markets and increased tariffs struck hard. New railways and the rise of manufacturing towns failed to compensate for losses in the older industries. In the s industrial towns declined, as their industries were closed down after takeovers by central Canadian competitors, or were adversely affected by national policies and hindered from competing in national markets.
By the s pulp and paper mills had surpassed lumber in importance and their rise encouraged the development of hydroelectricity. Nevertheless, farm and fishing activity declined and emigration rates remained high in succeeding decades.
Government campaigns for economic development in the s and early s, although not always successful, meant the expansion of forest industries, the advent of a new and important mining industry, modernization of fisheries and farming, increased manufacturing based largely on local resources and the cultivation of tourism. Potatoes , especially seed potatoes, are the province's chief agricultural export.
Production is concentrated along the upper Saint John River valley. Following potatoes, the most important crops are fruits and berries, and floriculture including nursery crops and sod.
Dairy production is most important in Kings, Westmorland and York counties, where farmers supply the three major cities. Mining was traditionally of scant importance in New Brunswick.
The gypsum , granite and grindstones included among 19th-century exports were largely of local significance. Although coal led to a rapid development of the Grand Lake region, especially with the arrival of the railway in , this area never yielded enough to make the province self-sufficient. With coal's loss of status to oil and hydroelectricity , coal mining came to a virtual halt by the mids. The energy crises of the early and mids led to coal's recovery through strip-mining, but by then coal was upstaged by mineral developments in the northeast.
The discoveries of extensive base metal reserves in the Bathurst-Miramichi region in the s raised the mining industry to a position of major importance. Today, the major minerals mined are zinc , silver and lead.
Among non-metallic minerals, peat, stone and sulfur are of greatest importance. New Brunswick was better off than its Maritime and New England neighbours at the end of the cheap oil era signalled by the OPEC cartel and the shortages of —74 and — The publicly-owned New Brunswick Electric Power Commission had built, with federal assistance, a major dam on the Saint John River near Fredericton , which had more than doubled the province's electrical capacity from that source.
In , the New Brunswick government had already committed the province to nuclear energy through the construction of a Candu reactor at Point Lepreau. By , the proliferation of electrical generation capacity combined with a federal program to convert homes from oil to electrical heating resulted in a significant decline in the demand for oil and natural gas.
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