Northern Ontario in Historical Statistics 1871-2021

University of Ottawa Press/September, 2024

Reviewed by Charlie Angus

November 26, 2024

“There’s only one reason this town was built and one reason it remains.
5,000 feet down the No. 3 shaft where the highgrade starts to pay.
When the price of ore is rising there’s big dreams going down.
When it falls and falls again, it’s a heartbreak town.”

Grievous Angels, Heartbreak Town

If you turn on a local radio show in Northern Ontario it isn’t uncommon to hear the DJ read out the daily price of nickel, copper or gold on the international market. This isn’t just for public interest; it can be a matter of civic life and death. When the price of silver in my town of Cobalt dropped, our local mining industry was wiped out. The knock-on effect was the shutdown of the local grocery store, high school and Francophone grade school. Eventually, the town was forced to shut the local arena because the community lacked the tax base.

Northern Ontario has a distinct culture, forged by generations of Indigenous and immigrant communities who have persisted despite the economic roller coaster dictated by fluctuations of supply and demand produced in places most of us will never see. It is defined by a creative, resilient, adaptive mentality, and a gallows humour born of adversity.

And Northern Ontario is riddled with towns limping along as shadows of their former selves. Resource-based communities that were once key drivers of the national economy exist across the north like shipwrecked failures. Some were done-in by changes in the markets. Others by the depletion of once-rich ore bodies. The shutdown of mine and mill towns is an old Canadian story, as are the responses: some handwringing from politicians, a perfunctory article on the desperate scramble to find an economic alternative and then the country moves on.

The fact is that the reality of such hard and sudden crash landings is seen as the price of choosing to live in the north. It’s a boom-bust life. Sad but normal.

Only, it’s not normal. And this is where David Leadbeater’s new book Northern Ontario in Historical Statistics, 1871-2021 (with contributions by Pat Marcuccio, Charlene Faiella, Tomasz Mrozewski and Caitlin Richer) helps provide perspective. It is a deep dive into population changes in the north over the past century. It is a bleak picture of the decades of struggle to find sustainability in the great northland. A roadmap of economic underdevelopment, social stagnation and outmigration.

For academics and researchers, the breakdown of the numbers will no doubt be helpful. But what gives this work value is that it interprets the data through a political lens. From the first pages of the introduction, Leadbeater explains that the problem of development in Northern Ontario is that it was structured as resource exploitation colony. We have come a long way from the mercantile days of the Hudson’s Bay Company. But in other ways not so far at all. How else to explain the fact that a region blessed with natural wealth has been so hampered by underdevelopment?

Leadbeater explains: “The hinterland-colonial condition of Northern Ontario… is not about a static land or geography but about a political-economic relationship set in place by settler colonialism. That relationship [continues to exist] within exploitive structures based primarily on extraterritorial ownership, control and use of land and resources.”

The original colonial structure was imposed when the newly-established settler state assumed control of the vast Indigenous lands of the north. The people who lived on those territories were cut off from engaging in sustainable activities and forced onto postage stamp-sized reserves.

This colonial lens continued to be the basis for government view of the north once white settlers began moving lands north of the French River. In my book Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals I write about how the riches that led to the establishment of the community of Cobalt  mines transformed Toronto from a regional backwater into the global capital for mine investment. None of that money was reinvested in the region, where settlers in Cobalt were forced to live in squalid shacks with poisoned water and bodies damaged from accidents and industrial illness.

The name for this government policy was “Empire Ontario”, a vision articulated by economist Harold Innis as a means of exploiting the immense wealth of the sparsely populated north. He refined Empire Ontario into the enduring Staples thesis, which neatly divided Canada into the notion of a valuable urban “heartland” and a subservient “hinterland.”

The colonial/hinterland structure was built on some key principles – primarily maintaining some of the lowest resource revenue royalties in the world for mining interests. Hence the development of the north as a series of industrial outposts under the total control of companies like Noranda, Inco, Abitibi. Municipalities were denied the power to tax the immense wealth beneath their streets. Those revenues went to distant shareholders or governments at the federal and provincial level. Northern communities have been hampered by decades of chronic civic underfunding which forces them to go cap in hand to both resource companies and government for hand-outs and grants.

As an elected MP from Northern Ontario, I represent a region larger than the United Kingdom. It has meant driving down thousands of kilometres in snowstorms and often dangerous highways. I have flown by bush planes and helicopters to communities where no roads exist.

In their book Forgotten North, Authors Kenneth Coates and William Morrison write about Canada’s mediocre record of northern development:

“As one of the world’s great northern nations (at least in size) Canada has a remarkable record of failure and inactivity in the areas of northern-based architecture, urban planning, or environmental awareness… The northern regions of provinces have been rendered into internal colonies, their resources deemed to be available primarily for the benefit of non-Natives in the South and, with comparatively little thought given to the long-term prospects of northern society.”

This dismal level of underdevelopment jumps out in the statistics provided by Leadbeater. Even the city of Sudbury, arguably the most successful of the northern economies, continues to suffer underdevelopment from changes in the limited municipal taxation rates that has caused over $20 million in lost industrial revenue. This has forced municipal leaders to increasingly shift the burden to residents or underfund services, even as a resource revenues are booming.

There is a perverse humour among northern residents who like to rank the worst municipal roads in the north – with Sudbury and Timmins often topping the list. The fact that they are amongst the wealthiest in terms of ore production says it all.

From my perspective as the elected MP, one statistic jumped out as most jarring: the growing gap between the Northern Ontario population and the ever-growing urban south. In the 1980s, the north had a population just under 10% of the provincial total. This was reflected in the north having roughly 10% of the Ontario seats in Parliament. But as Southern Ontario has seen explosive growth, Northern Ontario’s percentage of population has simply not been able to keep up.

One of the successes of Canada’s democratic system is the attempt to balance the huge differences in population and geography across our massive country. Such efforts ensure that lower-population regions like rural Saskatchewan and New Brunswick are not swamped by voter-rich areas in urban centres. Such balance does not exist in Ontario, where the vast “hinterland” is tagged to the needs of the urban south.

As an elected MP from Northern Ontario, I represent a region larger than the United Kingdom. It has meant driving down thousands of kilometres in snowstorms and often dangerous highways. I have flown by bush planes and helicopters to communities where no roads exist. I have travelled wild rivers in freighter canoes so that Indigenous residents can engage with their elected representative.

But according to the recent boundary commission ruling, Northern Ontario is somehow “overrepresented” democratically. This has resulted in the elimination of the huge riding of Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasking and moving that seat to the Brampton area, which already has four MPs in a region not larger than 250 km.

This cutting of electoral representation comes as the north is once again in a period of exciting growth. Things are turning around. The mines are booming, partly due to global demand for critical minerals. Young workers are being sought out. Communities are scrambling to build homes for a growing multicultural population.

For me, the cutting of a seat will burden my riding with an additional 21,000 square kilometres and about a dozen new communities spread out over hundreds of kilometres of additional highways. I love serving the democracy of Canada, but not that much. Which is why I have decided not to run again.

According Leadbeater’s analysis, the disparity between north and south will continue to grow so that by 2046, that northern share of the Ontario population is expected to drop to 4.3%. Given those numbers, it will mean that Northern Ontario’s ridings will be stripped to a few enormous regions of extreme size, which will only serve to augment the political and social alienation of the people. This will be done to serve the “democratic” interests of the urban south. If such growing gaps continue, the colonial reality of the north as little more than a vast extraction zone for the wealthy heartland will be made bluntly clear.

Charlie Angus is the MP for Timmins-James Bay. He is the leader of the Juno-nominated band Grievous Angels and the author of Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals. His latest book Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed published by House of Anansi Press.