By Justin Frappe
THUNDER BAY – Analysis – The economy that built this city disappeared a generation ago. The harder question is whether our ambition disappeared with it.
Municipal elections tend to produce very practical conversations. Roads. Taxes. Policing. Housing. Potholes. Development approvals. All of these things matter, and anyone seeking a seat at City Hall should have sensible things to say about them.
But every so often a city faces a larger question than how competently it will administer itself for the next four years.
Thunder Bay may be facing one now.
Nominations have closed for the October 26 municipal election, and over the coming weeks candidates will make their respective cases for how this city should be governed. Before we get too deep into platforms and promises, however, there is a more fundamental question worth asking of them — and perhaps of ourselves.
Does Thunder Bay still believe in itself?
That may sound unnecessarily philosophical for municipal politics. I don’t think it is.
For most of the twentieth century, there was little uncertainty about Thunder Bay’s place in the Canadian economy. Fort William and Port Arthur grew because geography gave them purpose, and generations of people built an industrial city around it. Grain moved east through the elevators. Railways connected the continent. Forests fed enormous pulp and paper mills. Railway equipment was manufactured here. The harbour was not scenery; it was machinery.
This was a city that made things, moved things and employed thousands of people doing both.
Then much of that world disappeared.
The grain elevators became extraordinarily more efficient and employed a fraction of the people they once had. Mills closed. Machines shut down. Corporate offices disappeared. Railway employment contracted. Young people left for southern Ontario and western Canada. Each closure was treated as an individual economic event, but collectively they amounted to something much larger: the dismantling of much of the economic structure around which modern Thunder Bay had been built.
The population tells the story with unusual clarity. The Thunder Bay metropolitan area had 123,838 people in 1991. Thirty years later, in the 2021 census, it had 123,258.
For three decades, while much of urban Canada grew dramatically, Thunder Bay essentially stood still.
And yet Thunder Bay did not collapse.
That is important.
The city adapted. Health care expanded. Lakehead University and Confederation College grew in importance. Government, education and regional services became larger parts of the economy. Thunder Bay established itself as the indispensable service centre for a vast part of Northwestern Ontario. Today health care, retail and education alone account for nearly half of employment in the region.
There is considerable accomplishment in that story. Many North American industrial communities subjected to comparable economic dislocation fared far worse.
But survival carries its own danger.
A community can become so accustomed to managing decline that it forgets the difference between resilience and ambition.
I sometimes wonder whether that is what happened here.
For thirty years Thunder Bay became practiced at absorbing bad news. Another mill closure. Another round of layoffs. Another employer restructuring. Another young family moving away. Another grand announcement about some Northern development that remained perpetually five or ten years over the horizon.
Eventually pessimism begins to masquerade as wisdom.
Propose something ambitious and someone will explain why it cannot work. Suggest that Thunder Bay could grow and someone will remind you of everything that went wrong the last time. Talk about building an industry and the conversation quickly becomes one about which provincial or federal program might subsidize it.
None of this is irrational. It was learned through experience.
But caution, once institutionalized, can become every bit as dangerous as recklessness.
There is a profound difference between asking what can we get? and asking what can we build?
I am not convinced Thunder Bay asks the second question often enough.
The irony is that the economic case for confidence in Thunder Bay may now be stronger than our civic confidence itself.
Consider the port. It handled approximately 10.76 million tonnes of cargo in 2025, following 10.83 million tonnes in 2024. Those were among its strongest years in decades. Nearly nine million tonnes of grain moved through the harbour last year alone. An industrial asset sometimes treated locally as a monument to Thunder Bay’s past remains an enormously productive component of Canada’s transportation system.
Consider rail manufacturing. There have been plenty of moments when the future of the Thunder Bay plant looked bleak. Yet Alstom now has a $2.3-billion contract to supply 70 six-car subway trains to the Toronto Transit Commission, with final assembly taking place here. The contract also contains options for substantially more equipment.
Then look north.
The enormous mineral wealth of Northwestern Ontario has been discussed for so long that skepticism is understandable. Not every proposed mine will be built. Not every critical-mineral project will survive the journey from promotional presentation to producing asset. Governments have demonstrated an impressive ability to announce Northern infrastructure repeatedly without actually constructing it.
We should remain hard-headed about all of that.
But we should not become blind to geography.
Thunder Bay sits immediately south of one of the most mineral-rich regions of North America. It possesses rail, highway, port and air connections; industrial land; skilled trades; post-secondary institutions; engineering capability; an established service economy and a workforce accustomed to heavy industry.
If Canada is serious about critical minerals, domestic supply chains and reducing its strategic dependence on foreign processing, there are few cities better positioned to participate.
The mistake would be believing that participation means simply watching ore pass through Thunder Bay on its way somewhere else.
That is the old trap.
A confident city would ask how much of the value chain can remain here.
Can we process more of what Northern Ontario extracts? Can we fabricate the equipment its mines require? Can we develop mining technology here? Can Thunder Bay become a centre for specialized manufacturing, engineering and transportation technology? Can our university and college produce intellectual property as well as graduates? Can Indigenous communities and businesses participate not simply as stakeholders in Northern development but as owners of it?
Most importantly, can we build more companies headquartered in Thunder Bay?
That last question receives remarkably little attention.
Economic development is too often measured by the arrival of an outside employer. We celebrate 100 jobs, understandably, while giving considerably less thought to where the ownership, profits, decision-making and accumulated capital ultimately reside.
A genuinely prosperous Northern economy cannot forever consist of branch plants, government institutions and subsidiaries whose important decisions are made somewhere else.
Thunder Bay needs capitalists.
I do not mean that provocatively. I mean entrepreneurs who start companies here, industrialists who build them here, investors who finance them here and families who accumulate wealth here and reinvest it into the next generation of businesses.
Cities with strong locally rooted business communities possess something government programs cannot manufacture: agency.
And agency may be what Thunder Bay lost most profoundly during the long industrial decline.
The objective should not be to recreate the Thunder Bay of 1975. We couldn’t if we tried. Modern elevators can move vastly more grain with vastly fewer workers. New mines employ fewer people than their predecessors. Automation will continue replacing labour in manufacturing. Nostalgia is not an economic development strategy.
It may be more industrial than we have become accustomed to imagining, but differently industrial. Advanced manufacturing rather than sheer labour intensity. Mineral processing rather than simply mineral extraction. Engineering, technology and specialized fabrication. Transportation and logistics. Research connected directly to commercial enterprise. Indigenous ownership and partnership on a scale previous generations scarcely contemplated.
And yes, health care, education, tourism, culture and government will remain important. The point is not to exchange one monoculture for another.
It is to recover the productive economy alongside the service economy.
That requires something government cannot appropriate money to create.
Confidence.
Not boosterism. Not pretending Thunder Bay has no problems. We have serious ones. Addiction, homelessness and disorder have damaged parts of the city. Housing is difficult. Infrastructure is expensive. Our population is older than Ontario’s and our working-age population will have to grow. Some neighbourhoods and commercial districts plainly need renewal.
Believing in a city does not require denying what is wrong with it.
It requires believing that what is wrong with it can be changed.
That distinction matters particularly in an election.
Candidates will quite properly be asked how they intend to manage municipal finances, roads, policing, housing and services. But I would like to hear something larger from the people seeking to lead Thunder Bay.
What do they think this city can become?
Not what grant will they apply for. Not what committee will they establish. Not what strategy document will be commissioned.
What are we trying to build?
A city that merely remains the administrative capital of Northwestern Ontario is viable. It may even be comfortable.
But that strikes me as a remarkably small ambition for a place possessing Thunder Bay’s geography, infrastructure, institutions, natural-resource hinterland and history.
Perhaps the most damaging legacy of the last forty years is that we have lowered our expectations so gradually that we barely noticed ourselves doing it.
We survived the decline of the economy that created modern Thunder Bay. That was an achievement.
We should not make survival our permanent ambition.
There are moments in the life of a community when circumstances change sufficiently that it must reconsider what it believes about itself. Thunder Bay may be approaching such a moment now.
We have spent a generation learning how to endure decline.
The next generation should learn how to pursue growth.
But first we have to believe that we are capable of it.
