The Bas-Saint-Laurent (, 'Lower Saint-Lawrence) is an administrative region of Quebec located along the south shore of the lower Saint Lawrence River in Quebec. The river widens at this place, later becoming a bay that discharges into the Atlantic Ocean and is often nicknamed "Bas-du-Fleuve" (Lower-River). The region is formed by eight regional county municipalities and 114 municipalities. In the south, it borders the US state of Maine, the Canadian province of New Brunswick and the Quebec administrative regions of Chaudière-Appalaches and Gaspésie–Îles-de-la-Madeleine.
It had a population of 199,039 and a land area of as of the 2021 census.
The territory has evidence of human occupation since the Pleistocene by successive indigenous peoples. The historic First Nations occupied it all until European colonisation started in the late 17th century; France made land concessions to settlers under the Seigneurial system of New France to encourage colonization. However, development of this region was slow until it started to exploit its mixed forests. Settlement gradually developed further inland, on the littoral, and since the late 20th century a leisure and recreation industry has developed.
Its geography is marked by the Saint Lawrence River to the northwest, the Notre Dame Mountains section of the Appalachians, as well as the Matapédia and Témiscouata valleys, which forms the natural communication corridors with the Gaspé Peninsula, the state of Maine in the United States, and the Maritimes.
Etymology and toponymy The region takes its name from the Saint Lawrence River, a waterway that has a central role in the history of Quebec and forms the northern border of the region. The name of the river, and by extension the region, has a hagiotoponymic origin originating from the baye sainct Laurens named by Jacques Cartier, originating from the date of discovery being 10 August 1535, day of the festival of Saint Lawrence in the Christian martyrology. The name of the bay was used again to describe the river when the Narration, his report of his expedition, was translated to Spanish and Italian, and definitively fixed by its use in the world map of cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, according to historian Marcel Trudel.
The name "Bas-Saint-Laurent", however, only appeared much later. In their Histoire du Bas-Saint-Laurent, the historians Fortin and Lechasseur assert that the relation with the Saint Lawrence grew with the population of the region in the 19th century. The first mention of the name is attributed to a report from the Rimouskois deputy and writer Joseph-Charles Taché, which used the term to describe "the two shores of the Bas-Saint-Laurent except the Gaspé district". The authors, however, write that Taché preferred most of the time to use more precise and well-known references, like the counties of Montmorency and Rimouski. Even if the name of the region was present on a map made in 1863 by Stanislas Drapeau, it took time to settle in; the expression "le Bas du Fleuve" being preferred.
With the settlement of Témiscouata and la Matapédia, the name start imposing itself between 1920 and 1960, when a number of enterprises and organisms of the region delimitated by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Rimouski and Rivière-du-Loup, like the Compagnie de transport du Bas St-Laurent and the Compagnie de Pouvoir du Bas-Saint-Laurent or the newspaper l'Écho du Bas St-Laurent adopt it.
After being eclipsed for two decades when the State tried to erase regional differences by putting in place shared administrative structures east of the Quebec, the start of the 1980s sees this policy change, as the great region Bas-Saint-Laurent-Gaspésie is split into two different territories, being more accurate for the distinctive cultural traditions of these regions.
The evolution of the toponymy of the region takes root in the different steps of its development, with at first the initial settlement by First Nations. This was followed by a progressive settlement by French-speaking colonists starting in the very late 17th century, which was expanded on more in the 18th century. This was taken to an even greater extent in the 19th century. Additionally, there was a small Scottish presence starting in the 1800s, with activities centered on agriculture and the exploitation of its waters and forests. The last phase of this evolution took place when some inland communities started to decline and its centres of activity were reinforced.
Geography
Situation and political divisions
The Bas-Saint-Laurent is a region in the East of Quebec, delimited to the north by the Saint Lawrence River, to the south by New-Brunswick and Maine, to the east by the Gaspé Peninsula and to the west by Côte-du-Sud. It extends over an area of , with of land area, which represents a bit less than 2% of the total area of Quebec, however, this area also represents 10% of the inhabited area of Quebec, or about half the land area of Switzerland.
The region is divided into eight Regional county municipalities (RCM), which contain 130 municipalities. Bas Saint-Laurent contained 200,462 inhabitants in 2011, of which 55,400 were in its most populous RCM, Rimouski-Neigette. Otherwise, the least populous RCM of the region is Les Basques, with only 9,000 inhabitants in 2011, a number which decreased by 1,300 since 1996, making it also the RCM with the highest annual rate of population decrease of the region, with a rate of 9.6% between 2006 and 2011.
Forested areas and waterways dominate the land use of Bas-Saint-Laurent. The region counts of mixed forests, of coniferous forests and of waterways. Humid lands only covers and the land devoted to agriculture covers , while developed areas represent only , which equals to 0.5% of the total land area of the region.
Geology Even if an isolated area of Cambrian and Precambrian rocks exist in an area of the Chic-Choc Mountains, the region belongs generally to the geologic province of the Appalachian Mountains, which covers an area of , between Alabama and Newfoundland. The marks of two episodes of mountain-building, the Acadian orogeny and the Taconic orogeny, have shaped the land.
During the first orogeny, the Taconic, the subduction of the oceanic plate created a volcanic chain in the Iapetus Ocean, off the coast of Laurentia during the Cambrian period. The magma surfacing mixed with the sediments originating from the continental erosion and the volcanic arc of islands got gradually closer to the continent to the subduction. The two collided 450 million years ago and formed a chain of immature mountains, the Taconic Mountains, their nappe covers a part of the Saint Lawrence Lowlands.
This first zone, which follows the river today, is known as Humber's zone. Dating from the Ordovician, this bedrock is composed primarily of sedimentary rocks : sandstone, mudrocks and conglomerates. South of this zone, the Gaspé belt is the remnant of a second mountain formation during Siluro-Devonian times. Around 430 million years ago, the Taconic mountains eroded and created sediments that deposited at a shallow depth. As Laurentia and the micro-continent Avalonia deformed and raised the sedimentary deposits and volcanic rocks and created a second chain of mountains, the Acadian Chain, which superposes itself on the Taconic Chain.
Seismicity
The estuary of the St. Lawrence River in front of the Charlevoix region is one of the most active seismic regions in the east of Canada. Five earthquakes of a magnitude superior to 6 have occurred in history, in February 1663, December 1791, October 1860, October 1870 and February 1925. The distribution of these earthquakes indicates a concentration in the estuary, near La Malbaie and Rivière-du-Loup.
Surveys and the establishment of a seismometer network were conducted in the 1970s and allowed to circumscribe the seismically active area in an area of on along the Saint Lawrence River, this zone includes the towns of La Malbaie, Baie-Saint-Paul and La Pocatière. The seismic data indicates that an earthquake happens on average every 36 hours in the Charlevoix-Kamouraska zone. They are concentrated in the Precambrian bedrock under the Logan line and the Appalachian Mountains, at a variable depth between deep and the surface
Another seismic area located in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, in a triangle between the towns of Matane, Baie-Comeau and Sept-Îles. However, this seismic area is less active than the one uphill, as only an average of sixty earthquakes occur each year and has not had a destructive earthquake in history. An earthquake of magnitude 5.1 occurred in 1944 east of Godbout and another of the same magnitude occurred on the 16 March 1999, its epicentre was located at about south of Sept-Îles.
Topography
The topography of Bas-Saint-Laurent has two main elements : the plateaus of the Appalachian Mountains, called Notre Dame Mountains, and the lowlands in the fine stripe of land along the St. Lawrence River. These are separated by an intermediate area of ridges and foothills which meld with the plateaus. The Notre Dame Mountains, are a group of small mountains with summits reaching between high. the landscape is sometimes interrupted by valleys, like the Témiscouata valley or Matapedia Valley. These two parallel valleys allow access to The Maritimes, Maine and Chaleur Bay.
The littoral, spanning across is composed of riverside land of altitudes ranging from above sea level. This area has a depth of before reaching the mountains in the west of the region, but reaches in the vicinity of Rimouski, only to shrink again in the eastern limits of the region. This riverside land disappears entirely between the municipalities of Sainte-Félicité and Grosses-Roches. In the western part of the territory, this littoral plain is interrupted by inselbergs, ridges reaching that can reach 200m in height, typical of the riverside land of Bas-Saint-Laurent
In the Quaternary, the region was marked by glaciation. the Wisconsin glaciation caused the crust to sink by in the vicinity of Rimouski. When the end of the glaciation started in 18,000 BP, it opened a sound in the Saint-Laurent valley, isolating the glacier covering Bas-Saint-Laurent from the one covering Côte-Nord. The isostatic rebound created an inland sea, the Sea of Goldthwait, which flooded the region under at most 200m of water in the area around Rimouski.
The withdrawal of the Sea of Goldthwait was gradual, 2,000 years ago the isostatic rebound stabilised at around per year, the withdrawal of the water formed a number of narrow streaks of emerged land near the riverside between Rivière-du-Loup and Rimouski, known today as Île aux Lièvres, Île Verte, île aux Basques, île du Bic and île Saint-Barnabé.
Hydrography
The estuary of the St. Lawrence River, to the north of the region, plays a primary role in the region. It is divided in two regions split at Cacouna: west of Cacouna, it is called a medium estuary, while east of the municipality it is called a maritime estuary or lower estuary.
The region is relatively poor in fresh water, since lakes and rivers only count as 1.5% of the land area. It possesses two hydrographic regions, the first holds all the streams that pour into the estuary of the Saint-Lawrence river and the region of Chaleur Bay and Percé, whose streams flow south into New-Brunswick and Maine. These regions influenced the layout of the administrative areas of Bas-Saint-Laurent, by setting limits to some regional county municipalities.