Population Shifts in the Maritime Provinces

“THE first enumeration of the people in what is now the Dominion of Canada was made at Port Royal in 1605 by De Monts’s band of settlers. The returns of this census are still extant. Not until 1671, however, was the first regular census taken in Acadia, showing a population of 441”

“At the time of Confederation the Maritime Provinces were almost entirely rural. St. John and Halifax had populations considerably over twenty thousand; Charlottetown had eight thousand; while Fredericton had six thousand. There were no other towns with over three thousand inhabitants, and only Truro, Dartmouth, Windsor, Pictou, Liverpool, and Yarmouth in Nova Scotia, and Woodstock in New Brunswick, had populations between two and three thousand.”

Grant, J.W. “Population Shifts in the Maritime Provinces”
Dalhousie Review, Volume 17, Number 3, 1937 https://dalspace.library.dal.ca/bitstream/handle/10222/57407/dalrev_vol17_iss3_pp282_294.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y