>In Canada there's a natural and easy North/South transportation and trade links, but East/West nature of the country breaks that.
As Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself. https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>
>I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.
Correct. Confederation was the biggest mistake in the Maritimes' history. From an economic or demographic perspective, the region since 1867 has been in constant decline. The single most-important reason is the region's loss of its traditional US markets; unsurprisingly, the rest of Canada has *never* compensated for this loss in terms of economic activity.
Before 1867 the Maritimes' economic ties were to New England and the rest of the US, not to Ontario and Quebec. Had Nova Scotians' wishes been followed by London in 1867 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Confederation_Party>, it would not have stayed with the other provinces in confederation. No railroad existed between the Maritimes and Ontario/Quebec until the 1870s https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/intercolon...>! Well into the early 20th century, an ambitious young man or woman from the Maritimes went to Boston or New York in what locals called the "Boston States", not to Montreal or Quebec.
Such an outcome was exactly what Nova Scotia's fierce opponents of Confederation (and, usually, advocates of US annexation) feared https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_movements_of_Canada...>. There is no inherent reason why the region can't be as wealthy/populated as New England today. Northern Maine is empty because of a conscious decision to keep it for forestry; despite its northern two thirds being devoid of human life, Maine alone has two thirds of the population of the Maritimes. A PEI with full, untariffed access to its traditional US customers might have received more Italian, Irish, and Portuguese immigrants drawn to its fishing and potato industries. To put another way, an American PEI today could have 500,000 people with 100,000 people each from greater New York and Los Angeles, and 50,000 each from Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and Atlanta; i.e. unnoticeable decreases in those areas.
As for Newfoundland, that things have improved since 1949, and especially the recent oil boom, does not change the immense poverty for most of the island's history. Read the accounts of the British/Canadian/American officials and soldiers who came to the Rock during WW2; the "Newfie" pejorative arose among the Canadians because even they—much poorer than their American counterparts than now, relatively speaking—could not believe just how backwards things were.