North needs more sticky places.

• Author: Robinson, David (American basketball player)

Do you want to live in a sticky place? A town that can keep doctors, painters, writers, nurses and teachers? Where your taxes stay with the schools, hospitals and colleges close to your home? A town that businesses don't want to leave? A community that your kids don't want to leave?

"Sticky Places in Slippery Space" is the catchy title of a 1996 paper by economic geographer Ann Markusen. Markusen was trying to explain "why certain places manage to anchor productive activity while others do not."

The problem is that economic space is getting more slippery all the time. With free trade, information technology, globalization and capital mobility, companies can go anywhere. Why should they stay in your town?

Stickiness is a major issue in Northern Ontario. As an economist I am asked: "What can we do keep our kids in the North? How can we retain businesses? How do we attrac businesses that will stay? Will fair wage legislation keep money in the North? Will health care investments keep people in the North? How do we keep doctors (or nurses, or radiologists, or teachers)?". In other words, how do we make northern communities stickier?

On May 9, Premier Ernie Eves announced his stickiness plan for the North. All of Northern Ontario will be designated as the province's first-ever tax incentive zone. This designation is for 10 years, effective Jan. 1, 2004. The theory is that money makes good glue.

Tax holidays and financial incentives do work, although one study in the U.S. found that they can cost half a million dollars for each job they attract. Subsidies like this aren't bad if we can get someone else to pay. Queen's Park is willing, so why shouldn't southern taxpayers bribe companies to set up in the North? And 10 years is long enough for some to get attached to the North.

Ideally, industries generate their own glue. For over a century economists and geographers have been talking about how industrial districts develop. Why do clusters of firms and workers in certain special places attract more firms and workers? Understanding this natural agglomeration process might help us develop similar clusters in Northern Ontario.

We can also look for small, cheap, clever ways to make the North stickier. That's what the Kirkland Lake town council did.

In 1999 council passed a remarkably sneaky resolution. It asked the minister...