Investment Activity and Trends in Northern Ontario: Part Three – Thunder Bay and Sudbury

In this third installment on investment activity in Northern Ontario as illustrated by building permit data, I am going to focus on the roles of Thunder Bay and Sudbury.  These are the two largest urban centres in Northern Ontario with CMA populations of 122,000 and 158,000 respectively accounting for about 38 percent of Northern Ontario’s population of 745,000.  As the largest urban nodes, one would expect them to be major drivers of economic activity and new investment and the data suggests that they are indeed major economic contributors but are not exactly punching much above their population weight.

Figure 1 shows the total nominal value of building permits (and the linear trends) issued in Thunder Bay and Greater Sudbury over a 20-year period and reveal that Thunder Bay has stayed relatively flat over this period whereas Sudbury enjoyed a pronounced boom from 2003 to 2009 but has since cooled off somewhat.  More interesting is Figure 2, which plots Sudbury’s share of Northeastern Ontario’s permits, Thunder Bay’s share of the Northwest’s permits and then their combined share of all of Northern Ontario.  On average, over the period 1989-2011, Greater Sudbury has accounted for about 34 percent of all building permit values in the Northeast and Thunder Bay for about 60 percent of the values in the Northwest.  Both of these are in line with their respective population shares with Thunder Bay somewhat more dominant in its region and together they account for an average of about 41 percent of Northern Ontario’s building permit activity.  This share has been trending down slightly over the period 1989-2011 generally as a result of weaker performance by Thunder Bay given that the trend for Sudbury has been pretty constant.

While Thunder Bay and Sudbury are important economic drivers for the region, these results suggest that they are not overly dominant and that new investment activity is dispersed throughout Northern Ontario.  The other towns and cities of the North – particularly Sault Ste. Marie, Timmins and North Bay – are also important drivers.  Thunder Bay and Sudbury’s share of new investment activity in Northern Ontario is approximately the same as their combined population share of the region.