Re-inventing Thunder Bay's economy: oil sands, mineral exploration, global logistics in city's favour.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: SPECIAL REPORT: THUNDER BAY

Thunder Bay is going to transform its economy, and it's going to do it sooner than later.

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That well-worn story of Thunder Bay as a battered forestry mill town with hundreds of lost jobs? It's yesterday's news.

There's bigger and brighter prospects ahead, says Steve Demmings, CEO of the Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission, who boldly predicts the city's economy will be turned around within five years. China's and India's thirst for commodities--wheat, lumber, minerals, steel, oil--and Western Canada's need for skilled labour and steel fabrication, puts Thunder Bay and all of northwestern Ontario in an advantageous position.

"It's staggering to see what the opportunity is and it's all on our doorstep," says Demmings.

The real economic power in Canada is shifting to the West and Thunder Bay needs to have a partnership stake. That was the message he took home from the National Buyer Seller Forum in Edmonton where he spent three days as part of an Ontario delegation with Economic Development Minister Sandra Pupatello.

Southern Ontario's manufacturing economy tied to the struggling North American auto industry may be in free-fall, but Northern Ontario is poised to do well.

The speed of global trade and investment is happening so fast, it's literally taking place within a few hundred kilometres of the city

India's Essar, a Forbes-listed company, acquired Sault Ste. Marie's Algoma Steel on the other end of Lake Superior, and to the south, the Mumbai-based giant is building a steel mill on top of a Minnesota Iron Range ore deposit.

"China and India are impacting everything we do, even right here on Lake Superior," says Demmings, the former president of Site Selection Canada, a Winnipeg consulting firm offering services to expanding technology companies.

Since arriving in April 2007, he's been taking stock of Thunder Bay's emerging knowledge-based sector, its research-oriented university, a high-tech college, an underutilized Great Lakes port and rail network, a cluster of industrial fabricators and suppliers, the robust mineral exploration scene, and the community's quality of life.

Then he sees it's all located in the middle of North America, a strategic cross-roads to do business.

The city has made some inroads into Alberta through their Thunder Bay Oil Sands Consortium, a 25-company group of machine shops, fabricators, welders and structural capabilities, engineering and logistics...