First Nation sees value-added opportunities with industrial park: Fort William First Nation teams up with Thunder Bay to organize, promote on-reserve brownfield property.

• Date: 01 January 2020
• Author: Ross, Ian

Fort William First Nation and the City of Thunder Bay have reached common ground on a sizeable spread of largely vacant industrial land.

For the past three years, the neighbouring communities have been huddling on a monthly basis to strategize how to make 1,100 acres of brownfield property on the reserve development-ready for tenants.

With large swaths of industrial land limited in Thunder Bay and the business-minded First Nation of 900 always having aspirations to create an industrial park on its dubiously dubbed Grand Trunk Pacific Lands, a new economic relationship has taken shape.

Whenever the Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission fielded queries about industrial properties, the extensive acreage over in Fort William always came up in the conversation.

"There's not a lot (of industrial land) in the city," said Michael Pelletier Sr., Fort William's economic development director. "It makes sense."

What to do to maximize the benefits from such a large, underutilized asset to create jobs and business opportunities became a topic for discussion in a joint working group of local politicians and economic development officers from both communities.

The initiative was funded by the Council for the Advancement of Native Development Officers and the Federation of...