Are we thinking about the North all wrong?

• Author: Cirtwill, Charles
• Position: Think Tank

About six years ago, the Government of Ontario launched a project trying to design plans for two regional economic development areas (REDAs) for Northern Ontario: one in the northwest and one in the northeast. Not a bad idea. After all, Statistics Canada thinks about us this way. They even helpfully provide data about the economy, workforce, population, health and education levels in these two "economic regions."

Problem being, those regions are geographically enormous, demographically diverse and not culturally or economically uniform. They have different levels of infrastructure depending on which part of the region you are in. Needless to say, the effort largely floundered on the challenges of bringing such disparate interests together into a single plan (well, two plans).

In the 2011 Growth Plan for Northern Ontario, the focus was on hubs and, in particular, on the "economic and service hubs of the North." It was highlighted that "more than half of Northerners live in the cities of Greater Sudbury, North Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Timmins and Thunder Bay." The five city regions were seen as the catalyst for Northern growth.

The flip side of that population statement is, however, that almost half of Northerners live outside those five centres. Large numbers of people and communities saw themselves excluded from a plan built around the five major cities. Especially in areas like the Kenora and Rainy River Districts, where the majority of economic connections run to the south or west (to the United States or to Winnipeg), not back east to Thunder Bay and the rest of Northern Ontario.

All this said, when thinking about government investment in infrastructure, human capital, and population growth, it is ouseful to look at a region as opposed to an agglomeration of disparate and disconnected communities. So, asking how many regions there actually are in Northern Ontario is an important first step in getting government policy right. If there are say, 12 regions, not five, and the government builds service hubs and targets investment to grow those five, then seven will be, by definition, ignored.

In a paper commissioned by Northern Policy Institute, we asked an expert to explore the region's cultural, demographic and economic connections and use them to define how many natural economic regions we had...