Looking for a positive government touch

It took a lot of hard work to get the Maritimes in the socio-economic state they are in today.

Examples of industry large and small seem to have found their legs. But there are clouds - and they are a lot closer than the horizon.

Starting in Halifax: where have all the drill rigs gone?

Locally, we're losing our four-century-old agriculture industry - not just pork and poultry: we've already lost vegetable canning capacity and the markets that go with it.

Oddly enough, the excuse for the canning facility's demise was we don't make the cans here. We can make tires for huge earthmovers and engines of war. We make rail cars that move civilizations' products over land. But we can't make a can.

Things aren't going well here; geography and global forces suggest our little region could - and should - be the Singapore of the North Atlantic.

This is where the Royal Bank of Canada began, the Bank of Nova Scotia is rooted, Cunard Steamship Lines sailed from, and where the first steel was poured in Canada. I remember being herded with hundreds of other elementary students down to the Trenton steel works office to see Prime Minister John Diefenbaker unveil the monument in the early1960s.

The Fuller Brush guy was born in this very county.

Nova Scotians opposed Confederation in 1867 for good reason, and elected successive anti-confederation governments for years afterwards. To no avail. They feared central and western Canadian economic priorities would power the new country, at the expense of the Maritimes.

Tariffs and emphasis on the railway to the west reduced the Nova Scotia economy and its position. To settle the west, the railway and the government offered free passage to attract Maritimers out west to farm. This kept up until the economic recession in the immediate pre-Great War period.

Even with this, Maritime steelmaking accounted for half the steel produced in the country almost until the war. Trenton plants churned out 15 million artillery shells for the effort, the largest production in the empire.

In the Second World War, however, centralization of industry had taken such a hold contracts could be had for only four million shells. Ships were built just about anywhere else but the Maritimes.

No, globalization is taking its toll on local markets and production - as our agri-food industry can attest.

What is amazing is there is as much as there is still here, and that we can still export skilled and educated young people. We've continued to pay our share when it comes to national emergencies - the current mission in Afghanistan is example of that.

We have to be vocal about this.

A grandson of the region, Prime Minister Stephen Harper - like many before - has been frustrated and a little embarrassed by what had taken place over the decades. Now, I suspect, he knows more of the full story - and what has to be done.

It's time the federation started working for us - at home and abroad. Federal government intervention to make this happen isn't undue interference in markets.

Intervention was done for decades, stripping the region bare. Positive intervention would merely be correcting a wrong.