A Colony in the Snow

After years of trying to have our northern voice heard in Queen’s Park, I am beginning to realize that North Bay is viewed as little more than a colony in the snow. Like our four northern sister cities of Thunder Bay, Timmins, Sault Ste Marie and Sudbury with our little outpost towns and villages, we are nothing more than modern-day colonies of the Great Green South.

In times gone by, colonies supplied raw materials like wood, furs and mineral products, perhaps exotic spices if the climate was conducive to growing plants with pointy leaves, coco berries or magical mushrooms. In times of plenty, fishes, fowls and deer meats could be sent home to the old country. In the warm season, its was sometimes very pleasant for the nobility to spend a few weeks in the colonies, basking in the fresh air away from the hustle and bustle of the Big Metropolis. Some of the colonizers even built seasonal estates in the outback, hiring colonials as caretakers, guides and cooks.

Two hundred years have slipped by and we still have the many of the old colonial attitudes towards the north. We are still seen as hewers of wood and carriers of water by many of our fellows in the south. Our young people still leave the colonies to seek their fortunes in the Big Smog, and conversely, there are still colonizers who come to the wilderness to make a fortune in raw materials.

The truth be told, we may deserve some of that patronizing viewpoint. Why are we still sending so much raw product to the south? Why are we not adding more value to more our forestry product – and I do not mean shaping logs into 2 x 4 (or 1 ½ x 3 ½) boards. Why do we not mill our own minerals and turn them into the finished product instead of shipping almost raw materials south?

Part of the answer is that we do not own the companies that harvest our natural resources, and so have little or no say in the processes. The shareholders on Bay Street, and even Wall Street, are the ones who hold the reigns of our financial destiny. They are the ones who own the steel mills, the furniture plants, the transportation and communication companies. They are the ones who own Queen’s Park.

Oh yes, we colonists get a vote to give us the illusion that we have some small say in the political arena. One wonders why there is a Minister of Northern Development and Mines and no Minister of Southern Development and Quarries. Are there no colonies in the south? At least the Minister comes from another colony, Sudbury.

We do get periodic visits from the Minister of Health when they give us funds to build and outfit a suitable colonial hospital – after arguing with and threatening the local politicians. The Minister of Education will occasionally drop in on Nipissing and Canadore to encourage them to train our youth so they can migrate south to better jobs.

We decry the slow extension of the four lanes on Hwy 11 to the Minister of Transportation when he visits, but the roads will only improve as the need of southerners traveling north put demands on the system. All the lumber trucks from New Liskeard and Timmins can find their noisy way south at night, but it is the tourist traffic coming north as the Lords and Ladies visit their colonial mansions that will determine when we get wider and smoother roads. Our airport will easily handle the daily rush of three small passenger aircraft for many years, but until we have commercial products to ship by air, forget any expansion.

Our hospital can dabble in newer technologies over the internet, but we simply do not have the population to support specialized clinics – it is more cost effective to ferry us back and forth to the large southern centers for special needs than to try to encourage specialists to live and work in North Bay where they can not hone their skills, let alone their scalpels.

Our university faces the same problem. As talented and learned as our professors may be, they can not get into the rich fields of research that the bigger southern universities can offer. We can only offer our children so much in education before they must leave the colony in pursuit of post-graduate work.

The problem is that there just are not enough of us. Even the largest of the five colonial cities does not have the population to meet that critical mass needed to ferment and grow on its own. And how can we grow when so many of our skilled young people have to leave to find a job that meets their expectations of the good life?

To keep our youth and create jobs we have to add more value to our resources before we ship them off to the rest of the world. It is not enough to trap for furs and sell the pelts – that should have stopped a hundred years ago. Surely we can fashion fur coats, mittens and boots as well as someone in Milan, Italy.

Surely someone has the skills to turn wood into floor tiles, cupboards and four-poster beds. We make the resins to bind the arborite boards and those ubiquitous sawdust-filled pressboard sheets that are the base for almost everything, but we never quite finish the job here in the north. Perhaps it is the cost of transporting finished goods versus raw materials but maybe the big southern market should be paying for those costs, not we in the north.

North Bay has our Barney the Blacksmith, but really, we have to do more with our mineral resources before we ship them abroad. One wonders if it rankles the people at Longyear to have to buy back steel made from our ores to make equipment like drill rods to mine the ore that makes the equipment . . . Too bad we do not have enough cheap energy here in the north to do that smelting and milling. I suppose we could keep some of our hydro electric power from Mattawa or tap into the natural gas that runs in pipes beneath our feet.

Until we receive more for our natural resources, more for our northern skills, we will always be a Colony in the Snow. We need some equalization for our natural resources before any more of our youth are sucked away to that great southern vortex called the Golden Horseshoe.

I wonder where they got the gold that gilds that horse shoe.