Northern MLAs: lead now or leave.

• Author: Robinson, David
• Position: OPINION - Member of the legislative assembly

Northern MPPs have come to a time of reckoning. They hold the balance of power in Ontario. The five NDPers and one Conservative can change the North. In the next few months we get to see if they have the vision and the guts to act.

The provincial legislature has 107 members. There are 50 Liberals. Any four Northern members can make a deal with Premier Kathleen Wynne: give us one really big win for the North and we'll give you one more year of power.

There are several policies that are worth breaking party lines for: leaving resource revenues in the North; creating a regional government; taking control of Ontario Northland and developing a Northern transportation policy; and--this is an especially big one--creating a stainless steel industry for the North based on the Ring of Fire.

If Northern MLAs deliver any one of these changes they will be heroes. They will own their seat's election for the next 100 years. If they don't even try, Northerners should throw the toothless pussycats out. They will have thrown away the North's future.

The really big opportunity is to make sure that the chromite from the Ring of Fire is used to create a stainless steel industry in Northern Ontario. Northern Ontario has almost everything it needs to succeed. We have chromite, nickel, ports on the Great Lakes to supply iron ore, a rail system, and even a steel mill in Sault Ste. Marie. What we lack is a business class with guts and a government with vision.

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Cliffs Natural Resources intends to ship more than half of the 3.2 million metric tonnes of concentrate it will produce out of the country. No other jurisdiction in the world would let this happen. Every other G8 country has a stainless steel industry. The Government of Ontario, so long committed to sucking resources out of the North and subsidizing southern industry, doesn't seem to know there is a problem.

Finland provides a model of vision and self-respect. Starting in 1959 with a smaller and lower grade chromium deposit than we have, and facing weaker world demand, the Finns decided to create an integrated stainless steel facility in the Arctic. It took them almost 20 years to get it into production, but not one pound of chromite ore leaves Finland before it is transformed into stainless steel. The...