Pandemics are ultimately associated with great economic and social change as once the pandemic subsides, there is never a full return to the previous world. In Thunder Bay, the changes wrought by the pandemic have emphasized and highlighted many of the city’s problems. Along with continuing high rates of crime, homelessness, racism, mental illness, and the growing effects of a changing climate, the lineups at food banks have been increasing and there even seems to be a return to a wild west frontier mentality with increasing numbers of people being stopped by police for driving under the influence. Thunder Bay has always been a city with a mean frontier edge to it whether it is on the city’s roads, its bars, or its school parks and playgrounds.
The recent surge in COVID-19 cases particularly in lower income homeless residents accentuates the reality that there are really two Thunder Bays – a Thunder Bay of growing poverty as employment and health becomes more precarious given job loss and city businesses hard hit by the pandemic and one of secure largely broader public sector driven employment. The evidence of the social and economic changes that have emerged over time are there for all to see - if they want to.
Figure 1 shows that the decline in homicide rates in Thunder Bay that had been occurring in tandem with the rest of the country came to an end circa 2007 – perhaps not entirely coincidentally at the tail end of the massive economic shakeup of the regional forest sector crisis. They have since been rising and Thunder Bay invariably emerges year after year as the murder capital of the country. Figure 2 shows that over the last decade, overall building permit values – which signal new investment – have trended downwards and residential permit values have been largely stagnant. Figure 3 shows that housing starts have essentially been flat at low levels compared to the pre-1990 period. Figure 4 shows that over the last 20 years, employment has trended downward with the pandemic providing the expected additional downward spike at the end of the series.
Over the longer term of its economic history, as captured by the evolving population size shown in Figure 5, Thunder Bay has essentially been stationary since the 1970s. That is important because population still is an important economic indicator in that population growth tends to respond to economic opportunity and Thunder Bay’s lack of population growth is the one long-term indicator of the state of its economy. Our city’s population peaks in the late 1970s and 1980s and has actually trended slightly downward since. One wonders about the coincidence between the end of growth in the 1970s and the onset of a monopoly municipal government in place of the formerly competitive municipalities of Fort William and Port Arthur.
It is true that the Thunder Bay CMA population is larger at about 125,000 or more and has actually trended slightly upwards in recent years. However, it is the official population of the City of Thunder Bay within its city boundaries and not the CMA population and residents external to Thunder Bay city proper that matter because in the end it is the tax base of the City of Thunder Bay that pays for services in the city via the tax levy. Yet, what is quite remarkable is that despite the lackluster growth in major indicators, there has been substantial growth in the tax levy of the City of Thunder Bay and associated municipal employment as Figures 6 and 7 demonstrate. While the rate of growth of the tax levy has declined over the last five years, it has grown faster than both population and inflation combined.
All this coincides with the growing disquiet many residents feel with respect to the direction the City has been taking. Yet, in the face of mounting evidence of substantial issues there seems to be an increasing sense of detachment from the public by the Mayor, City Councillors and Administrators given recent decisions such as the pursuit of expensive major capital projects like the proposed new Indoor Turf and police facilities, the silence on the epidemic of home plumbing issues linked to City water, and a pathological preoccupation with seemingly superficial issues like tourism signs and sporting events. True, our city councillors are always quick to articulate their concerns about the problems facing Thunder Bay and indeed much of their meetings are taken up by pious words too numerous to count but in the end, they are either unable or unwilling to systematically tackle the future.
A key part of the problem is that our patterns of civic decision making are rooted in a mid-twentieth century vision of where Thunder Bay needs to go. My take on that vision – which I articulated in an earlier post – bears repeating and can be summarized as follows: Thunder Bay is a regional center and strategically located full-service high-tech urban oasis set in a pristine natural wonderland with a wonderful quality of life on crucial east-west trade and transport routes whose full potential is unrealized. Indeed, the entire City’s potential is unrealized and what Thunder Bay needs is continual infrastructure investment to attract people and effective communication of our potential to convey the message of how wonderful we are. While Thunder Bay may have social problems, they are not any worse than other places and have been blown out of proportion by the national media. City residents need to have a positive attitude, stay the course on this strategy, and we need to invest in the public services and infrastructure to make it all happen.
This is in essence what continues to drive civic policy in Thunder Bay even though since amalgamation in 1970 the City has stayed static in population, its industrial mainstays have largely disappeared, and its grain transportation role shrunk to a shadow of its former glory. While there indeed has been some employment diversification into a knowledge economy and the health and education sectors that have helped provide a market and business opportunities for some entrepreneurs, it remains that this has been largely a rear-guard maintenance action that has barely kept pace with the employment losses. Moreover, much of this employment growth has been in broader public sector employment making it increasingly tied to political decision making in Toronto or Ottawa. Our political clout is not as large as we like to think given the higher population growth in southern Ontario.
Key to this local vision is the level of municipal spending, employment and infrastructure investment partly geared towards keeping the economy going via construction projects. This spending is financed by government grants and by tax increases levied increasingly on the residential tax base given the departure of the industrial mainstays who provided the base for the past development of a very generous level of municipal spending and programs. Tax increases are justified by “a build it and they will come philosophy” but it has become apparent that after fifty years we have built a lot and not too many have joined us. When the point on practically zero population growth is mentioned, the response is that we have large numbers of temporary residents whether they be students or visitors from outlying First Nations requiring services. However, we do not seem to have accurate numbers documenting this aside from the ones City Councillors and Administrators like to throw out - numbers like “20,000 or 30,000 more” during meetings without supporting empirical evidence. More to the point, there is the question as to why municipal ratepayers should even be providing these additional services out of a local property tax base? Where are the provincial or federal governments in all of this? Indeed, in the wake of rising cases recently, the pandemic has revealed just how truly stretched our resources are given that Thunder Bay is serving as a regional health and social service support center on a city budget.
We have an expensive vision of local and regional municipal government spending based on an economic base that no longer exists. That vision is justified by a “build it and they will come philosophy” that continues after waiting 50 years for results. Thunder Bay continues to invest and prepare for the next boom and yet that boom never comes or is much more subdued than expected. Even the most recent mining strategy released by the city’s Community Economic Development Commission continues in this tradition by documenting the prospects of 7,000 jobs over the next decade - nearly a decade after the prospects for the Ring of Fire’s mining boom were first pronounced.
When the Mayor and Council are criticized, their rebuttal takes the form of dubious arguments such as the need to invest today for tomorrow and how we need to invest in our quality of life. Who can argue with quality of life or renewal of aging infrastructure? Yet, it turns out that much of this money is being spent on just two things – administration and protection. We have one of the highest per capita tax levies of major cities in the province and spend the highest per capita amount of 27 major Ontario municipalities on administration, police and fire while managing to be one of the lowest spenders on the remainder. The need for a re-balancing of spending priorities is obvious.
Taxes and fees go up but that is justified by our civic leaders as all right because our cost of living and property values are lower thereby resulting in lower taxes relative to bigger cities with more expensive housing meaning they can be raised more because they are a bargain compared to Toronto. This is debatable but not the main point. If the cost of living here was truly lower resulting in a surplus for local residents in excess of what they need, why we might not want to keep money in our own pockets rather than simply hand it over to the local municipal-protection-administrative-construction complex is a question that Thunder Bay politicians do not want to answer.
What is to be done? The mindset and vision that has permeated our local municipal political and economic decision-making culture needs to change. That is more difficult than you can imagine given how entrenched the current vision has become and the short-term municipal political and bureaucratic interests tied to specific projects and expenditures. It is beyond the abilities of any one individual to change an entire municipal tax and spending culture but change needs to start somewhere. It probably also is more than just a municipal culture vision as in the end the outlook of the entire community has been permeated by the current mindset. It is also a new community vision of what Thunder Bay ultimately can or cannot be and do.
Changing Thunder Bay’s municipal tax and spending culture requires four steps. First, there needs to be a recognition that there is indeed a problem and we are a long way away from that given the substance of debate at City Council. Second, once the problem is recognized, there needs to be a meaningful reorientation of priorities. The current expenditure review process is insufficient because it merely presents a smorgasbord of specific tasks and projects to horse trade over given that administrators and councillors look at parts rather than the whole system. The reorientation needs to be at a broader level. Third, in keeping with the reorientation of priorities, it needs to be followed by a major reorganization of services. Fourth, this should then lead to renewal – a renewal of the local municipal and community vision affecting taxes and expenditures and ultimately the quality of life in Thunder Bay.
In the end, the new vision must be one that acknowledges that we need to live within the economic limits of how the Thunder Bay economy has evolved and the fiscal resources available. Within this new limited resource base, there needs to be a shift in priorities away from the current big-ticket items of protection and administration and towards the social and environmental needs of Thunder Bay’s citizens and their growing diversity. It will be a big change and it requires leaders with a municipal and regional vision that goes beyond short-term spending to create short-term employment projects in the hopes that we can buy time until the next boom comes. After 50 years of treading water, it is time to swim in a new direction.