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New Brunswick (, locally ) is one of the ten provinces (and three territories) of Canada. It is one of the three Maritime provinces and one of the four Atlantic provinces. It is the only province with both English and French as its official languages. New Brunswick is bordered by Quebec to the north, Nova Scotia to the east, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to the northeast, the Bay of Fundy to the southeast, and the U.S. state of Maine to the west. New Brunswick is about 83% forested and its northern half is occupied by the Appalachians. The province's climate is continental with snowy winters and temperate summers. New Brunswick has a surface area of and 775,610 inhabitants (2021 census). Atypically for Canada, only about half of the population lives in urban areas. New Brunswick's largest cities are Moncton and Saint John, while its capital is Fredericton. In 1969, New Brunswick passed the Official Languages Act which began recognizing French as an official language, along with English. New Brunswickers have the right to receive provincial government services in the official language of their choice. About of the population are anglophone and are francophone. New Brunswick is home to most of the cultural region of Acadia and most Acadians. New Brunswick's variety of French is called Acadian French and 7 regional accents can be found. New Brunswick was first inhabited by First Nations like the Miꞌkmaq and Maliseet. In 1604, Acadia, the first New France colony, was founded with the creation of Port-Royal. For 150 years afterwards, Acadia changed hands a few times due to numerous conflicts between France and the United Kingdom. From 1755 to 1764, the British deported Acadians en masse, an event known as the Great Upheaval. This, along with the Treaty of Paris, solidified Acadia as British property. In 1784, following the arrival of many loyalists fleeing the American Revolution, the colony of New Brunswick was officially created, separating it from what is now Nova Scotia. In the early 1800s, New Brunswick prospered and the population grew rapidly. In 1867, New Brunswick decided to confederate with Nova Scotia and the Province of Canada (now Quebec and Ontario) to form Canada. After Confederation, shipbuilding and lumbering declined, and protectionism disrupted trade with New England. From the mid-1900s onwards, New Brunswick was one of the poorest regions of Canada, a fact eventually mitigated by transfer payments. However, the province has seen the highest eastward migration in 45 years in both rural and urban areas, as people living in Ontario and other parts of Canada migrate to the area. As of 2002, the provincial GDP was derived as follows: services (about half being government services and public administration) 43%; construction, manufacturing, and utilities 24%; real estate rental 12%; wholesale and retail 11%; agriculture, forestry, fishing, hunting, mining, oil and gas extraction 5%; transportation and warehousing 5%. A powerful corporate concentration of large companies in New Brunswick, including most newspapers, are owned by the Irving Group of Companies. The province's 2019 output was CA$38.236 billion, which is 1.65% of Canada's GDP. Tourism accounts for 9% of the labour force either directly or indirectly. Popular destinations include the Hopewell Rocks, Fundy National Park, Magnetic Hill, Kouchibouguac National Park and Roosevelt Campobello International Park.
[edit] Demography
With the New Brunswick Equal Opportunity program launched in 1966, county councils were abolished. However, counties continue to be used as an organizational unit, along with parishes, for registry of real-estate and to some extent taxation thereof. They figure prominently in residents' sense of place and continue as significant threads in the Province's cultural fabric (i.e., most citizens always know which county they are in). They still appear on most maps, including Google Earth where they show up better than does the Canada-United States border. WeRelate lists the cities, towns, and more rural municipalities in New Brunswick according to the county they were in until 1966. Alterations to the structure since that date are included in the description of the places concerned. [edit] History
[edit] Indigenous societiesIndigenous peoples have been in the area since about 7000 BC. At the time of European contact, inhabitants were the Mi'kmaq, the Maliseet, and the Passamaquoddy. [edit] European settlements[edit] French colonyThe first documented European visits were by Jacques Cartier in 1534. In 1604, a party including Samuel de Champlain visited the mouth of the Saint John River on the eponymous Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day. Now Saint John, this was later the site of the first permanent European settlement in New Brunswick. French settlement eventually extended up the river to the site of present-day Fredericton. Other settlements in the southeast extended from Beaubassin, near the present-day border with Nova Scotia, to Baie Verte, and up the Petitcodiac, Memramcook, and Shepody Rivers. By the early 1700s, the French settlements formed a part of Acadia, a colonial division of New France. Acadia covered what is now the Maritimes, as well as bits of Quebec and Maine. The British conquest of most of the Acadian peninsula occurred during the Queen Anne's War, and was formalized in the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. After the war, French Acadia was reduced to Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island) and Île-Royale (Cape Breton Island). The ownership of continental Acadia (New Brunswick) remained disputed, with an informal border on the Isthmus of Chignecto. In an effort to limit British expansion into continental Acadia, the French built Fort Beauséjour at the isthmus in 1751. From 1749 to 1755, the British engaged in a campaign to consolidate its control over Nova Scotia. The resulting conflict led to an Acadian Exodus to French-controlled territories in North America, including portions of continental Acadia. In 1755, the British captured Fort Beauséjour, severing the Acadian supply lines to Nova Scotia, and Île-Royale. Unable to make most of the Acadians sign an unconditional oath of allegiance, British authorities undertook a campaign to expel the Acadians in the initial periods of the Seven Years' War. [edit] British colonyContinental Acadia was eventually incorporated into the British colony of Nova Scotia, with nearly all of New France being surrendered to the British with the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Acadians that returned from exile discovered several thousand immigrants, mostly from New England, on their former lands. Some settled around Memramcook and along the Saint John River. In 1766, settlers from Pennsylvania founded Moncton, and English settlers from Yorkshire arrived in the Sackville area. However, settlement of the area remained slow in the mid-18th century. After the American Revolution, about 10,000 loyalist refugees settled along the north shore of the Bay of Fundy, commemorated in the province's motto, ("hope restored"). The number reached almost 14,000 by 1784, with about one in ten eventually returning to America. New Brunswick was founded in 1784 upon the partition of Nova Scotia into two areas which became the Provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In the same year, New Brunswick formed its first elected assembly. In 1785, Saint John became Canada's first incorporated city. The population of the colony reached 26,000 in 1806 and 35,000 in 1812. The 1800s saw an age of prosperity based on wood export and shipbuilding,[1] which was bolstered by the Canadian–American Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 and demand from the American Civil War. St. Martins became the third most productive shipbuilding town in the Maritimes and produced over 500 vessels. In 1848, responsible home government was granted,[2] and the 1850s saw the emergence of political parties largely organised along religious and ethnic lines.[1] The first half of the 1800s saw large-scale immigration from Ireland and Scotland, with the population reaching 252,047 by 1861. The notion of unifying the separate colonies of British North America was discussed increasingly in the 1860s. Many felt the American Civil War to be the result of weak central government and wished to avoid such violence and chaos. The 1864 Charlottetown Conference was intended to discuss a Maritime Union, but concerns over possible conquest by the Americans, coupled with a belief that Britain was unwilling to defend its colonies against an American attack, led to a request from the Province of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec) to expand the meeting's scope. In 1866 the United States cancelled the Reciprocity Treaty, leading to loss of trade with New England and prompting a desire to build trade within British North America, and Fenian raids increased support for union. On 1 July 1867, New Brunswick entered the Canadian Confederation along with Nova Scotia and the Province of Canada. [edit] Modern New BrunswickConfederation brought into existence the Intercolonial Railway in 1872, a consolidation of the existing Nova Scotia Railway, European and North American Railway, and Grand Trunk Railway. In 1879 John A. Macdonald's Conservatives enacted the National Policy which called for high tariffs and opposed free trade, disrupting the trading relationship between the Maritimes and New England. The economic situation was worsened by the decline of the wooden ship building industry. The railways and tariffs did foster the growth of new industries in the province such as textile manufacturing, iron mills, and sugar refineries,[3] many of which eventually failed to compete with better capitalized industry in central Canada. In 1937 New Brunswick had the highest infant mortality and illiteracy rates in Canada. At the end of the Great Depression the New Brunswick standard of living was much below the Canadian average. In 1940 the Rowell–Sirois Commission reported that the federal government attempts to manage the depression illustrated grave flaws in the Canadian constitution. While the federal government had most of the revenue gathering powers, the provinces had many expenditure responsibilities such as healthcare, education, and welfare, which were becoming increasingly expensive. The Commission recommended the creation of equalization payments, implemented in 1957. After Canada joined World War II, 14 NB army units were organized, in addition to The Royal New Brunswick Regiment, and first deployed in the Italian campaign in 1943. After the Normandy landings they redeployed to northwestern Europe, along with The North Shore Regiment.[4] The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, a training program for ally pilots, established bases in Moncton, Chatham, and Pennfield Ridge, as well as a military typing school in Saint John. While relatively unindustrialized before the war, New Brunswick became home to 34 plants on military contracts from which the province received over $78 million.[4] Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who had promised no conscription, asked the provinces if they would release the government of said promise. New Brunswick voted 69.1% yes. The policy was not implemented until 1944, too late for many of the conscripts to be deployed.[4] There were 1808 NB fatalities among the armed forces.
The flag of New Brunswick, based on the coat of arms, was adopted in 1965. The conventional heraldic representations of a lion and a ship represent colonial ties with Europe, and the importance of shipping at the time the coat of arms was assigned. [edit] Research Tips
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