Northern Ontario.

She is all I’ve ever known. I was born here, and I’ll probably die here. There is something to be said for someone who willingly ekes out a living in Northern Ontario – you develop a rough sense of appreciating what you have with what you can get – because you’re basically on your own otherwise.

Anyone living north of Sudbury knows of the experience in existing in a land where you live in two worlds; one where you are fundamentally ignored as a human being, and another where you are a very useful but equally very disposable economic pawn.

The towns up here were usually built with one goal in mind.

Dig.

Secondly, dig faster.

The faster you can reach the higher-grade ore, the better. Twelve hour long shifts, unless the lift cage goes down – then you’re probably stuck at 1,670 metres deep in the womb of the earth for another hour or so. It’s a fact of life, etched into the fabric of our communities up here. Hard labour and natural resources define life in Ontario’s northern frontiers. In fact, if you ever engage in small-talk with any working class Ontarians in the North, and you’ll find that we have three basic starter topics:

• How much snowfall is in the forecast.
• How sore our backs are because of having to shovel all the damn snow.
• The price of gold and nickel.

In 2022, Canada mined an estimated production value of $13.2 billion of gold. Gold remains one of the largest and most valuable mined commodities, with Ontario – specifically, Northern Ontario – mining 46% of our nation’s total gold output. Our nickel output in 2022 was valued at $7.5 billion, with Northern Ontario mining 49.8% of the national output; the importance of nickel mining is growing due to it’s usage in stainless steel, and nickel-cadmium batteries.

Yet – drive Highway 101 through Timmins, Ontario and you can literally feel where the wealth of this province goes. With the size of these potholes – clearly, not fucking here. Go for a walk in Hollinger Park, and look at the houseless gathering near the park’s bandstand – watch as social services are paralyzed to do impactful social work in our city simply because the funding and the available (and affordable!) social housing and wraparound social supports aren’t there.

I mean – God help you, if your child gets a high fever, because the Timmins and District Hospital is running a deficit of $4.1 million. This is a district(!) hospital with a very large catchment area, and services the wider north of Ontario – including some very under-served Indigenous reserves up north that lack proper medical services.

Instead, the very fruit of the labour that comes from our Northern mines free flows down south, enriching southern Ontario while maintaining the status quo system of regional neglect that has become the standard for simply existing in the North. The Hudson Bay Company that once ruled this land as an unchallenged colonial and oligarchic behemoth may be long dead and nothing more than a margin note in Canadian history books, but it’s settler-colonialist mercantile policies still live on in essence. Exploit the work of northern labour and the land they live on, and suck the productive value out of the hinterlands down into the coffers of the political sycophants, and C-suite pricks in the wealthy southlands – while leaving nothing but token crumbs for barely maintaining what the previous government(s) cut. If you don’t like it, fuck off and move down south where your the money is.

You have to ask yourself this question:

How is it that a portion of the most populated and wealthiest province of a G7 country is so resource rich that it’s contributions amount to the majority of the nation’s mined ore, yet remains so goddamn economically starved?

It gives you the idea that the provincial government would just prefer it if you died – just a bit more quieter – as you hand over your hard-earned cash to a cabal of wealthy southern developers. Because that is the idea. Northern Ontario persists to this day as nothing more than an economic colony in a modern state; to be used and abused as long as it remains politically and economically valuable.

So how do we solve this issue that is gripping so many northern communities?

For one, the focus should be pointed towards the provincial government of Ontario; currently headed by Doug Ford of the Progressive Conservatives. While the Federal Government can assist in combating the economic stagnancy, and social inequity of Northern Ontario – it remains primarily the legal jurisdiction of the Premier of Ontario to overlook the social and financial well-being of Northern Ontario – funny how that fucking works out, eh?

We can immediately help the communities in the North by:

• Reversing the Harris highway transfers that downloaded provincial jurisdiction of certain highways onto Northern municipalities. Returning the roads to the jurisdiction of the province will ensure that roadways are kept up to provincial standards, while socializing the costs across the entire province to reduce the weight on both municipality taxes and give Northern municipalities more breathing room in their budgets to support social and public services. Our northern cities and towns will once again be able to build and support bigger services and supports.

• Committing to consistent and sustained provincial housing/healthcare/educational funding for all of Ontario that specifically addresses a unique approach to Northern Ontario. The requirements, culture, and barriers faced by Northern Ontario can be unique in ways in which a policy in South Ontario may not be applicable.
  • For example, the overcrowding of long term care clinics in Northern Ontario may cause an elderly Canadian to be far removed from their family – some may be relocated over 150 kilometres into the next available care unit due to the distance between cities and towns in the North.

• An economic development plan that allocates a significant portion of the province’s productive value towards northern development to stimulate industrial and economic growth via public investment.
  • A portion of our productive value can also be entrenched within a Northern Ontario wealth fund as a state-owned investment fund that invests in real and financial assets within Ontario that are used to build much needed social infrastructure.

Ontario has failed in engaging it’s northern communities by being wildly inactive in participating in the continuation of the development of the very cities and towns that fuel their own economic prosperity in the South. In a way, they seem content on merely allowing the cities to exist as is with no care to break the ongoing decades of chronic provincial under-funding that undermines and drives away Ontarians from the Northlands.

Without realizing that with no meaningful and planned investment in the north – the gradual trickling out of Northern Ontario will come to harm the economic prosperity of Ontario and Canada entirely.

Ontario may have forgotten the North, but the North herself, never forgets.

– K –