Exeunt Stage South

The recent decision by the Near North School Board to cut back on the number of teaching staff due to decreasing enrolment emphasizes again the problem facing North Bay (and other northern cities). The reported trend of decreasing enrolment brings problems not only for the number of teachers we need, but for the number of schools we maintain in the district. Using the southern Ontario-based dictum that we should only have schools with 350 or more students, we will be hanging up the school bell in a number of our district schools.

Perhaps riding in the yellow sardine cans for an hour or more, morning and evening, will condition the youngsters for the daily commute in their future working life as they all move to the Golden Horseshoe to earn a living. While the prospect of having your children spend hours on school buses may persuade parents to move back into North Bay from the surrounding area, it may also give second thoughts to people fleeing the GTA in search of quieter environs. The lack of specialized teaching assistants may also deter some from the move north.

Like the laundry workers, the newly unemployed teaching staff may have to head down the highway to find work in their field of expertise. It would be a strain on our job market to have these people stay here and take the newly-created service industry jobs away from graduating students, but that may be their only option. Heaven forefend we should ever go back to a single, secular, public school system that would put hundreds more teachers, school bus operators and custodians out of work!

Unless we get the support funding for northern communities straightened out, we might as well become used to cutbacks and job losses. The economics of staying in the north as taxes rise and services deteriorate are not good. Northern cities can try to affix all sorts of patches to the sinking ship, but unless we can offer a brighter future for our young people, we will slowly slide further into the backwaters of the Ontario economy and politics.

North Bay’s population may indicate that we are holding our own, but do the numbers tell the whole story? As more and more of our population slips into retirement, how many of the 54,000 people actually live here 12 months of the year? Every fall when the snowbirds exeunt south, be it for 3 weeks or 5 months, they take away their spending from the North Bay market. They may still be paying their property and school taxes, even their flat-water bill, but they are not putting money into the local economy. Without this substantial part of the economic engine, small businesses suffer, as do the supermarkets, restaurants, box stores, auto shops and personal care salons.

There is little the politicians or business people can do to change the minds of the people seeking warmer climes, but they have to do whatever they can to build and maintain the workplaces for those trying to earn a living here in the north. It is a challenging balancing act between giving tax dollars to support businesses or institutions and getting those tax dollars from the public. We hear many cries for the school board or the laundry to spend more to keep the jobs, but there will be an accompanying cry of alarm when taxes shoot up to cover these costs.

Perhaps the exit south to either jobs or warmer weather is inevitable as the population moves towards the large urban centres. If that is the case, then we should be looking at a strategy to support the remaining population. That may mean looking at something like water meters in homes to decrease consumption so we do not have to build larger capacity infrastructure to support a decreasing population. It may mean looking at capital projects with a view to efficiencies for a population that is not going to grow, but in fact slowly decline.

The exit south of our population may mean that we should be managing the decline of our city so best meet the needs of the remaining population. Growth may return to the north, but if it does, there will be the population to support that increase in needs of infrastructure and services. In the meantime, we ought to be tracking that southern exodus and planning accordingly.