I spent two years as a reporter for the Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal, during which I had lots of time to explore Lake Superior's north shore — and communities like Marathon, Schreiber, Terrace Bay, and Nipigon. All of those towns are pretty much one-industry concerns and have been suffering terribly recently as mills and mines have been shut down.
I finally had a chance to talk about one of those towns — Red Rock — in a piece I filed earlier this week for Canwest News Service that takes a deeper look at some of the job numbers in Canada:
The tiny town of Red Rock, Ontario, will soon shutter its only municipal hockey arena, a direct result of the loss of its paper mill and major employer two years ago.When Norampac Inc. shut down its Red Rock facility in August, 2006, 350 people were thrown out of work, a very big deal when there's only 1,000 people in the town. And the prospect of replacing those jobs with nearby work were dimmed six months later when its municipal neighbour, Nipigon, a town of about 1,700 people a few kilometres away on Lake Superior's north shore, went through its own economic nightmare. Nipigon's employee-owned mill and major employer, Multiply Forest Products, burned down in a mid-winter fire so fierce, the town ran out of water trying to put it out. The mill is not being re-built and 100 people are out of work. There were sad stories like this throughout northern Ontario and Quebec in late 2006 and 2007. Montreal-based Domtar, alone, announced the closure of four mills, all on one day: October 11, 2006. Domtar mills in Matagami, Val d'Or and Lebel-sur-Quevillon, all in Quebec, and in Nairn Centre, near Sudbury, Ont., employing nearly 950 people were all quickly shuttered within weeks of Domtar's announcement. But none of those closures, or dozens like them in small rural towns across the country, ever generated the headlines or Parliamentary outrage that the threat of the shutdown of a General Motors plant in Oshawa, Ont. And yet, in relative terms, the manufacturing crisis in Canada's out-of-the-way corners, far away from television cameras, may be more alarming. And it's a crisis that's been mushrooming for years, well before GM ran into its problems. … It will be difficult, certainly, for the city of Oshawa and for the families of the 2,600 workers who may be laid off when General Motors shuts a pickup truck plant in 2009. But Oshawa will presumably still be able to operate its hockey arenas and provide other municipal services. And the 2,600 families facing a potential layoff may be comforted in some small way that the prospects for work in the Greater Toronto Area, with a population of nearly six million or so, are significantly greater than one-industry towns hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest large urban centre.Indeed, in the same week that GM said it was shutting a plant, Ford, on the other side of Toronto in Oakville, said it needed 500 workers for a new production line. But the workers in Red Rock, Matagami and other smaller dots on the map have few and sometimes no options for replacement work, imperilling the survival of entire towns … [Read the rest of the story]
Interesting article, good job. The economy continues to shift away from resource extraction and heavy industry to other sectors. As you note, that's okay when it's in a relatively urbanised space with a variety of large employers. Not so good when resource extraction and heavy industry are the only game in town.
Having been born and raised in a small town in Northern Ontario myself, I'm very familiar with the nature of these kinds of crisis situations. Fortunately, Kenora wasn't so heavily dependant on Boise Cascade that its loss killed the town, but it wasn't so insignificant that everyone in town didn't feel the impact. We were fortunate to have a reliable tourism base as well, but it was a seasonal thing.
It's having lived though such things that have made me a strong advocate of economic diversity, in any economy, be it Federal, Provincial or Municipal. We are learning hard lessons about that now in a time where once-thought “Guaranteed for Life” jobs no longer exist.
It's personified, I believe, in most of todays young people who no longer believe in a “career” in the traditional sense of the word. Very few in my generation, and even some from the Baby-Boomer generation, can imagine doing the same job for 30-45 years. People are diversifying their skills and exercising their flexibility.