Reclaiming the History of the Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration

Reclaiming the History of the Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration Mark J. McLaughlin (bio) 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 [End Page 126] 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. Ronald Rudin has helped fill that void with his first-rate book Against the Tides: Reshaping Landscape and Community in Canada's Maritime Marshlands, part of UBC Press's Nature | History | Society series. It took a senior scholar like Rudin to produce the first book-length study of the MMRA. The author of two previous books on Acadian history and culture, Rudin was well positioned to undertake the research for Against the Tides. And it was definitely an undertaking. As Rudin notes in the preface, "In Search of the MMRA," the agency might have been a federal one, but its records did not end up centrally located at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. Instead, documents associated with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were divvied up and sent off to Moncton and Truro, respectively, and often stored in less-than-ideal conditions. Other records were spread out in archives all across the Maritimes. Furthermore, Rudin's penchant for oral history proved to be key. Connections he made with local marshland farmers allowed him to access privately held minutes from past meetings of marsh bodies, the farmers' groups that maintained the dykes into the second half of the 20th century. These connections also meant that Rudin could access historical knowledge that, while perhaps obvious to those in the past, was not necessarily contained in the documentary record. A standout example is how Rudin used interviews with skilled sod cutters to demonstrate the level of expertise needed to create and maintain the dykes (34-6). Firmly entrenched within the field of environmental history, Against the Tides examines the events leading up to the founding of the MMRA in 1948, how the agency shaped the Maritime marshlands until its dissolution in 1970, and its legacies. Divided into two parts, the titles of each reflect what Rudin views as a distinct phase in the MMRA's 22-year existence...

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