 Celebrations of outport life have been combined with a long-standing sense of victimization, offering a parade of historical scapegoats from the fishing admirals to powerful merchants used to explain relative backwardness and failure.Atlantic Canadians increasingly share an angle of vision derived in large part from the unpleasant fact that, compared to the mainland, the Atlantic region is both economically poor and politically weak, and growing more so.Nevertheless, Atlantic Canadians have so far rejected political union.