Atlantica is bigger than you. But bigger can give the small Atlantic provinces of Canada more of an advantage in a economically central-Canadian driven nation, says Atlantica Party leader Jonathan Dean.

Although the Atlantica Party launched its campaign to become an official provincial political party in Nova Scotia this week, the Party’s concept of Atlantica revolves around the regional cooperation of all four Atlantic provinces: Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador. The creation of an economic union for the Atlantic region is one of several policy suggestions by the Party.

"We’re one region governed by four provincial governments, which makes no sense," says Dean." I think there is a lack of regional economic harmony. We have four small provincial economies when we should have one large regional economy."

The independent party believes in the potential and sustainability of the region. "[Everyone involved in the Party are] from this region and we all think it’s the best in the world," says Dean. "But it’s not doing too well. And that’s not right. We wanted to affect change.

"When the region has population growth that is projected to be either declining or flat-lining, that reads back into probably very minimal or stagnating economic growth," he says. "That’s been the case for the past 140 years."

Dean says that the current government is not doing much to help. He brings up the example of the federal development department in Ottawa fostering industrial nodes in different parts of the country in several fields like biotechnology, software, nuclear energy and aerospace, to name a few. He notes that not much has changed from the times of the World Wars, when plum Crown contracts do not get distributed past Montreal.

"We’ve been sidelined out of the national economy, I feel," says Dean. "I think that the model that the government is using now is still focusing on central Canada as an engine for the economy, and the Atlantic region is seen as a feeder to the central economy."

Uniting the provinces would strengthen the region both politically and economically, says Dean.

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"[In the future,] we see a rationalization of government services at the provincial level, with low costs," he says. "The economic union would eliminate trade barriers within the region and we’d have comprehensive regional planning with regards to the economy. And by pooling all of the provincial debts, we’d have a lower debt servicing charge as well. [If it ever happens,] we’d be in a much better position to withstand Quebec’s separation."

An Atlantic region could also hold more political clout, he says. "Union gives this region the opportunity of forming a federal party or parties in this part of the country," says Dean. "And that has interesting possibilities, I think."

Dean's party might have made a bad decision when they picked "Atlantica" for their party name, what with how it's being used by the potentially unpopular proposed Atlantica binational economic region that would unite Atlantic Canada with New England. The party made a bigger mistake when they picked their platform: Maritime Union and Atlantic Union have been discussed in various forms for a century and a half, the Charlottetown conference in 1864 actually triggered the formation of the modern Canadian federation and still, despite all this effort and despite a rationale that seems plausible, still there hasn't been any progress towards any "Atlantic Union" for the simple reason that's a broadly unpopular idea with Atlantic Canadians. Finally, the party's biggest mistake is in its existence. If the social-democratic New Democratic Party is only now starting to make electoral breakthroughs in Nova Scotia after nearly five decades of existence, a single-issue party can hardly do better.

Using growth in GDP per head rather than crude GDP growth reveals a strikingly different picture of other countries' economic health. For example, Australian politicians often boast that their economy has had one of the fastest growth rates among the major developed nations—an average of 3.3% over the past five years. But Australia has also had one of the biggest increases in population; its GDP per head has grown no faster than Japan's over this period. Likewise, Spain has been one of the euro area's star performers in terms of GDP growth, but over the past three years output per person has grown more slowly than in Germany, which like Japan, has a shrinking population.

Some emerging economies also look less impressive when growth is compared on a per-person basis. One of the supposedly booming BRIC countries, Brazil, has seen its GDP per head increase by only 2.3% per year since 2003, barely any faster than Japan's. Russia, by contrast, enjoyed annual average growth in GDP per head of 7.4% because the population is falling faster than in any other large country (by 0.5% a year). Indians love to boast that their economy's growth rate has almost caught up with China's, but its population is also expanding much faster. Over the past five years, the 10.2% average increase in China's income per head dwarfed India's 6.8% gain.