Tallying the Election Results in Thunder Bay

 

The people have spoken and Thunder Bay – along with all the other municipalities in Ontario – has a new mayor and council.  Congratulations to the incoming Mayor and City Council members as well as to all the candidates who put their names forward and ran.  Running for office and serving as the public in an elected role is a challenging and important task and vital to the functioning of our system of government.  

 

 It was certainly an interesting evening last night not the least because of the exasperating nature of the election results.  Despite our “state of the art” modern election system in Thunder Bay that combines online, phone, in-person, and drive through voting and with over one fifth of eligible ballots cast in advance, it took several hours before any meaningful results were delivered.  One hopes that this process will be thoroughly reviewed because in order for the public to have confidence in their voting system, the smooth running and operation of the system sends an important signal and that was certainly lacking last evening.

 

As for the results, Figure 1 presents the winners as well as their percent share of votes cast.  With about 35,421 votes cast (at my last tally) Ken Boshcoff emerged the winner as Mayor with 38.2 percent of the ballots cast with Gary Mack in second place with 34.3 percent of the ballots cast.  The At-Large winners (with over 140,000 votes given every elector can vote for up to 5) were Mark Bentz (11%), Shelby Ch’ng (9.4%), Trevor Giertuga (8.6%), Rajni Agarwal (7.6%) and Kasey Etreni (7.2%).  In terms of the Ward races, Michael Zussino took Red River with 33.4% of the vote, Albert Aiello retook McIntyre with 63.3% of the vote, Kristen Oliver held Westfort with 45.9% of the vote, Dominic Pasqualino won in Northwood with 41.6% of the vote, Brian Hamilton kept McKellar at 53.5% of the vote, Andrew Foulds kept Current River with 74.9% (a ringing endorsement one might add) and Greg Johnsen won Neebing with 36.1 percent of the vote.  

 

 

 

Was this a change council? Not really.  If you want to see the results of a "change" election you should check out Hamilton's results where three incumbents actually lost their seats and there are ten new faces on their City Council which consists of a Mayor and 15 ward councillors. In Thunder Bay with a council of twelve plus a mayor, seven of the elected councilors are incumbents (Bentz, Ch-ng, Giertuga, Aiello, Oliver, Hamilton and Foulds). If one counts Peng You as an incumbent then there was an incumbent not returned. As for the Mayor, well he has been Mayor before and a familiar face and is effectively an honorary incumbent making for eight incumbents on council.  Are the other five a vote for change?  At best managed change given that they probably only won because a number of incumbents chose not to run thereby making room for a few new faces.  Name recognition is important in politics and in Thunder Bay given its closeted nature even more so, which is why constant calls for people to run because there is a “candidate shortage” was so amusing to observe this summer.  Ward contests with more than three candidates essentially guarantee a win for incumbents and At-Large slates with upwards of 25 to 30 candidates for five positions pretty much do the same for those races.  Sometimes, quality of candidate should be a more important consideration than quantity.

 

Will it be smooth sailing for this council?  There are a lot of issues coming down the pipeline – not least of which will be policing - and one expects the honeymoon period will be short-lived especially with an anticipated major hike in property taxes being rumoured.  The other interesting issue is whether or not we should reform City Council and go to a fully At-Large system of between 8 and 12 councillors plus a mayor.  I would say the answer is a definite no.   If one looks at the results in Figure 1, the five At-Large winners have each won with barely 10 percent of the votes cast in their favour in the At-Large competition. They can claim to “represent” the interests of the entire city, but it remains that they do not have an overwhelming mandate aside from the fact they got the biggest numbers in a ranking.  The mayor’s position did somewhat better at nearly 40 percent.  It is the wards where the strongest mandates have emerged.  In three of the seven wards, the winners actually got a majority of the votes case, while in an additional two they were over 40 percent.  I would say there if you truly wanted democracy, there is probably a better case for an all-ward system than a fully At-Large system.

 

One other point.  Take a look at figures 2 and 3.  These are the “projected” winners based on the TBNewswatch online polls that took place the weeks of August 20 to 27 and October 7 to 17.  They are a mix of highly accurate projections and wildly off the mark results.  In the case of the mayor’s race, the McIntyre, and Current River Wards they were consistent with the actual election results though the percentages vary quite a bit.  For the At-Large race, they consistently showed Bentz as a winner but there was quite a bit of variation in the others over time.  Pretty similar conclusion from the remaining ward competitions which saw quite a few flip-flops though in the case of some wards like Westfort they probably reflect the closer nature of the race.  In the case of McKellar or Neebing it was either a really volatile race or well…something else perhaps given the nature of online polling.

 

So, to repeat, congratulations to the new mayor and council.  And of course, once again the drama begins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The House-Condo Price Differential: Northern Ontario Exceptionalism Strikes Again!

 

Population growth in northern Ontario has been weak over the last few decades as a result of youth out-migration as well as little immigration into the region – even though immigration has accounted for over three quarters of Ontario’s population growth in recent years.  The result has been an aging population and while Ontario  had a population share aged 65 and over of 18 percent in 2021, the province’s North was closer to 22 percent.  A more elderly population is usually seen as a source of rising demand for services like health and a cost driver for government.  At the municipal level, seniors are also a source of local income stabilization given that they still inject some purchasing power into the local economy and of course continue to pay property taxes. 

 

Yet, in the case of northern Ontario, the earlier waves of youth out-migration may eventually spawn a new wave of out-migration rooted in seniors following their children.  People in the 50 to 65 age range may be looking ahead and thinking about where and when they will retire and facing a choice between remaining in the north in retirement or relocating closer to children.  Weighing in on decisions to stay or go are the need to downsize accommodation and as the years advance staying in the north is certainly made easier by selling your house and moving into a condo or apartment.  What is intriguing in the case of condos in northern Ontario is how much higher priced they are relative to single-detached houses.

 

Figure 1 plots the median price of a single detached one in 2022 against the median price of an apartment style condo in twelve Ontario urban areas including Thunder Bay and Greater Sudbury.  The median single-detached housing price data for all twelve cities is from Canadian Real Estate Association web site while the median condo prices are from the same place with the exception of Thunder Bay and Sudbury which required creating a separate estimate based on what is currently available on Mitula or Realtor.ca.  Needless to say, that is not the ideal approach, but it will have to suffice given data limitations.  Figure 1 plots the urban areas from highest to lowest single detached median housing price and those prices range from a high of $1.425 million for Oakville to a low of $315,000 for Thunder Bay.  What is more interesting is the accompanying median condo prices which show a lot less variation than those for houses.

 

 

 

The range in median prices for single detached houses in these twelve cities is $1.11 million but for condos it ranges from a high of $648,500 in Greater Toronto to a low of $329,900 in Thunder Bay – a still consequential but much smaller range of $318,600.  Why is this important?  Well take a look at Figure 2.  In Oakville, if you decide to sell your $1.425 million-dollar median valued home and buy a median valued condo at $640,000 you generate a nice cash surplus $785,000 dollars that you can use to finance your retirement or assist your children in buying their home.  If you are in Thunder Bay, doing the same thing will require you to come up with nearly another $15,000 to complete the purchase of the condo. This is of course based on the median prices and in my observations over the last year taking a look at condos in Thunder Bay, very often the difference was more effectively in the $50,000 to $100,000 range depending on the unit.  At nearly $135,000, the gap is even more pronounced in Sudbury though the caution is that this is more likely a function of the much smaller sample size in terms of the Sudbury data currently available.  One would expect the gap to be more similar to that for Thunder Bay.

 

 

 

So here is the thing.  The population in northern Ontario is aging and, in many cases, there will be some consideration of relocating to where children and grandchildren have gone.  Selling your house in Thunder Bay or Sudbury and buying another house in southern Ontario is prohibitive given the vast difference in housing prices.  However, the spread for condos is a lot smaller and the fact is you are going to have to cough up quite a bit of extra money to stay put in a condo in Thunder Bay or Sudbury anyway making a move easier to swallow.  Given the higher cost of a condo relative to a single detached home in Thunder Bay or Sudbury, one cannot help but wonder if the strategy in condo building to date in these communities is simply designed to part widows and widowers from their money when they sell their houses?  Condos in other cities generally have a broader mix of residents based on demographics whereas when one tours a condo in Thunder Bay for example it is not hard to feel that you are visiting a long-term care home rather than a condo.  Even more interesting is the high proportion of condos in Thunder Bay that have little indoor or underground parking - not the best incentive if you are trying to minimize the impact of harsh winters in your Golden Years.

 

While the young are often the focus of policy initiative and consumer marketing, it remains that wealth and income rise with age and the loss of purchasing power of relatively young seniors – those in the 50 to 65 age range – will not help local economies in the north.  Northern Ontario will need to up its game in both the design and pricing of future condo developments if it wants to forestall the next potential wave of out-migration.

The Economic Agenda for the Next City Council

 

By late Monday evening, we will have in place the Thunder Bay City Council for the next four years and they will need to grapple with an assortment of issues not least of which will be trying to promote the City’s economic development.  As was noted in a report released last week, Thunder Bay’s economy has rebounded from the pandemic but still faces strong headwinds.  As the accompanying figure shows, while the employment declines of the COVID-19 pandemic were the steepest in over a decade, the recovery appears to have settled us at employment totals that are pretty much close to the long-term trend of flat long-term performance.  

 

 

 

Indeed, Thunder Bay’s rebound in both employment and income has lagged that of the rest of the province.   Moreover, given that the economy as a whole is facing higher interest rates and the probability of a recession, the New Year may not be exceptionally buoyant.  Economic growth and expansion of the city’s tax base is crucial if Thunder Bay is to avoid large tax increases as it seeks to deal with an assortment of social issues - not least of which is policing - that may indeed prove costly to the city’s budget.

 

As a result, it is surprising that there was relatively little discussion of the economy in this election campaign but perhaps that is because the local economy is still rather flush with stimulus money from assorted government initiatives while the City of Thunder Bay enjoyed substantial government grant revenues and pandemic savings.  This will not last forever especially given that the economy may be moving into recession.   While much of what happens economically is due to external forces and beyond the direct purview of the City of Thunder Bay, there are steps City Council can take to prepare the city to take advantage of opportunity when it presents itself to help foster economic development and strengthen the local economy.

 

First, City Council needs to ensure the City of Thunder Bay develops a reputation for efficient and effective delivery of public services and infrastructure projects based on outcomes rather than  wishful thinking.  While a problem before the pandemic, at present projects are taking even longer to complete than necessary and are very disruptive to local businesses and residents.  For any businesses considering coming to Thunder Bay, nimbleness on the part of City projects and services is a positive feature.

 

Second, City Council will need to be more competitive on the tax front and that will require providing its existing basket of services with fewer employees in order to hold the line on taxes. This may indeed prove to be the most serious immediate challenge the new council faces given that inflation is high, and wage and cost pressures are immense.  Nevertheless, the temptation to simply pass these costs onto local business and residential ratepayers should be resisted.  As part of the process of becoming more competitive, City Council also needs to cut red tape and facilitate quicker approval for building and business projects.

 

Third, the social challenges facing Thunder Bay are an economic as well as a social issue given that they create an environment that does not put the City’s best face forward when trying to attract new economic activity.  City Council with the help of Federal, Provincial, and Indigenous governments needs to effectively tackle issues that are currently not conducive to attracting business to the City and these issues include poverty, homelessness, and crime.  Despite some of the rhetoric that has been going on in this election campaign, there is no easy solution to these problems, but the first step is to recognize that the problem requires a team effort by all levels of government.

 

Fourth, there are some bright spots in the City’s economy that go beyond the stabilization provided by a broader public sector that employs over 30 percent of workers in Thunder Bay mainly in health and education.  City economic development marketing strategies should focus on sectors with the most growth potential and these include tourism, mining, and transportation.  The recent success of cruise ship visits to the city while not a panacea is nevertheless an optimistic development.  Mining support and supply is also a source of future opportunities and with the trend towards "own-shoring" more economic activity domestically, our transportation sector – in particular the Port – stands to benefit from increased activity. As a start, this fall is expected to see a bumper crop of wheat on the Prairies and given the disruption in global grain markets, Thunder Bay’s Port should see increased activity. 

 

And finally, looking ahead towards the future, another looming economic iceberg is the potential for a new out migration wave which may not be the young but the senior population.  People in the 50 to 65 age range are currently thinking about where and when they will retire and looking forward many may indeed decide that Thunder Bay is not the place to live out their golden years.  There are many in this age range whose children have moved away to southern Ontario or further afield, and they thus face the choice of remaining here in retirement or relocating closer to children.  While much is made of the fact that housing costs a lot in other cities, it is likely going to become more affordable as prices decline over the next 6 to 12 months. 

 

Wealth and income rise with age and the loss of the purchasing power of people with substantial assets will not help the local economy.  Weighing in on decisions to stay or go are the need to downsize accommodation but there is a lack of affordable and quality apartment and condo housing in Thunder Bay.  Cheap and poor design is indeed an issue given Thunder Bay’s winter climate as there is a surprising lack of indoor parking in many existing condos in Thunder Bay.  Then, there are the types of services that become more important as one ages especially if you choose to remain in your own home and here there is relatively poor performance on things like municipal snow removal. 

 

Massive municipal windrows in your driveway after a storm aside, the oft-heard mantra that you can retire and stay in your home and get affordable services as you age is aspirational in Thunder Bay given that residential services take second place to government contracts and large business projects for many providers resulting in relatively high-cost services.  No one likes a small residential contract when there are bountiful government and institutional contracts available.  This has only grown worse in the post pandemic labour shortage/inflationary world – for example, the average quote for getting the exterior of your house painted has literally tripled over the last ten years.   This  is well above and beyond where inflation has been over the last decade even with the pandemic.

 

As expensive as some think life in other cities in the rest of Canada is compared to Thunder Bay, there is still a lot more competition elsewhere that keeps prices and quotes for services in check as well as a better stock of well-designed housing options for all demographic groups.  True, City Council cannot be expected to single-handedly address Thunder Bay’s business culture and less competitive monopoly environment.  After all, Thunder Bay has always been a sort of monopoly company town with large employers such as pulp mills or railways and their economic spinoffs serving as milch cows for local business - not to mention municipal taxes.  We are now a government town, but City Council can stop adding fuel to the fire by insisting on better value for money when it comes to the services it purchases. 

Ontario Housing Prices Coming Down

The pandemic era in Canada saw a thirty percent increase in housing prices that were already high as a result of a decade of low interest rates and rising demand due to population growth.  However, a combination of rising interest rates led by the Bank of Canada in an effort to curb inflation, the inevitable subsequent slowdown in the economy, as well as inflation reducing the household resources available for home purchases has meant that home prices in Canada have finally reached their peak and are on the way down.  The latest Teranet-National Bank Housing Price Index Release shows that the National Composite House Price Index fell 3.1% from August to September, the largest monthly decline on record since the index began in 1999 and exceeded the previous month’s record decline of 2.4%. Needless to say, Ontario did not escape this trend but despite the drop, prices are still higher than they were a year ago.

 

 Figure 1 shows that year over year (September to September), prices were up in 15 out of 16 major Ontario cities with the exception being Peterborough.  The largest percentage increases year over year have been in Greater Sudbury, Kingston and Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo.  Thunder Bay's increase over the last twelve months was just under 4 percent.  However, prices are down from their peak in all of these cities as illustrated in Figure 2.  Most of these cities saw their prices peak in May of 2022 with the exceptions being Belleville, Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo and London  (peak in April 2022), Ottawa-Gatineau (peak in June 2022) and Thunder Bay (peak in July 2022).  

 

 

The largest declines since peak price have been in Windsor (16.2 percent), Oshawa (16.4 percent) and Peterborough (23.2 percent).  Meanwhile, the smallest declines since peak price were in Thunder Bay (5.7 percent), Greater Sudbury (6.1 percent) and Ottawa-Gatineau (8 percent).  Northern Ontario cities like Thunder Bay and sudbiury are not immune from national or provincial trends but they have historically not been as subject to the same fluctuations as other cities.  In Thunder Bay for example , the housing price boom while substantial relative to its historic prices was nevertheless more muted than the GTA.  The downturn will likely be similar.  It is probably no coincidence that to date the price drop in Thunder Bay, Sudbury and Ottawa-Gatineau has been the least of these 16 major cities as all three of these cities have an economic base of broader public sector employment at 30 percent of jobs or more (in the case of Ottawa- Gatineau) which provides a substantial economic stabilizer when the national average in closer to 20 percent.

Given that interest rates are expected to rise substantially next week as  inflation really shows no signs of abating in Statistics Canada's latest release, one should see the price decline continue into the fall.

The Next Council: The Challenges for Thunder Bay

 

Shortly, there will be a municipal election in Thunder Bay with a new council selected.  It is likely there will be a major change in composition with quite a few new faces and this will usher in a period of change though perhaps not as much change as one might expect.  In the end, The City of Thunder Bay is a corporation and what an election does is essentially select its board of directors who serve as an executive laying out direction with execution and implementation being the responsibility of the City Administration. Sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

The City Manager reports to City Council and is responsible for putting into effect the directives of council within the framework of what is allowed by the Province of Ontario. More importantly, the City Manager and Administration possess the information set from which the councillors then make their decision.  As well, given their role as full time employees rather than part-time representatives,  they have the time to deal with the detail of issues.  Inevitably, some councillors will find the level of information and detail overwhelming.  The overwhelming  complexity of issues in the past has often resulted in meetings where councillors on the advice of administration quickly make decisions on millions of dollars of spending and complicated bylaws with long-term impact while then spending hours debating relatively minor matters involving a few thousand dollars.

 

There are some departing members of the outgoing council that it will be sad to see go given that among them are the remnants of what passes for a fiscal conservative in Thunder Bay political life these days.  Based on a perusal of the candidate slate currently up for election, this is likely to be one of the more activist councils that Thunder Bay has seen in some time and their first test will be the 2023 budget.  A relatively new council will be heavily dependent on the advice of administration and also eager to deliver on whatever promises they have made and agendas they campaigned on, and the result will likely be a heftier tax increase than has occurred over the last few years. 

 

The Mayor’s position is essentially one of first among equals despite whatever strong mayor powers are eventually afforded by the provincial government to Thunder Bay.  The outgoing Mayor was good for Thunder Bay given he was articulate, well informed and lent a certain dignity and gravitas to the position – though some times while in the midst of yet another marathon Zoom meeting he seemed increasingly exasperated and resembled an artist being forced to work on a much smaller canvas.  Such a sentiment is understandable, but the Mayor might have been happier by drawing inspiration from others in Thunder Bay and northern Ontario in a range of positions and occupations who have made a career of working on a smaller canvas.

 

In the end, the challenges for the next council are many.  There is a housing and homelessness crisis in Thunder Bay that parallels that in other cities given the climb in rents and home prices during the course of the pandemic.  There is crime – with 12 murders already in 2022, Thunder Bay is well on the road to regaining its title as Canada’s murder city in per capita terms. And of course who can forget infrastructure whether it is roads and sewers or recreational infrastructure given that the Turf facility has reared its head as an issue in the election with some candidates expressing support for the concept but not at the original high cost. 

 

Surprisingly, little mention has been made of the other chaotic infrastructure problem Thunder Bay faced during the pandemic which was the plague of leaky pipes in homes throughout the city  in the wake of the sodium hydroxide water supply lead mitigation experiment.  Needless to say, the public silence from the outgoing Mayor and council on this issue - no doubt on the legal advice from City Administration and its lawyers given potential costs and legal liabilities - has left a bitter taste for many.  So much for a friendly community oriented city with your elected representatives always ready to lend an ear.

 

And the biggest issue?  Well elections are in the end obviously no place for serious long term policy discussions but the fact remains that Thunder Bay’s regional role as a centre for a growing and under counted Indigenous population is the big one.  Increasingly Thunder Bay and its municipal ratepayers are paying for regional services on a city tax base.  The latest example here is in the case of the Thunder Bay Police Service and the recommended changes that among other things ultimately mean the Police Service has to take a regional lens to its operations.

 

A move to a more regional approach in policing in the end is a continuation of a trend over the last twenty-five years that can be best described as informal and piecemeal northwestern Ontario regional government by default - a regional hospital service, a district social services board, a district emergency service organization, and regional public utilities such as Synergy North and TBayTel. Indigenous organizations have also established presence in Thunder Bay and Sioux lookout providing regional services to their members.  Yet, there was never really any type of democratic regional mandate for this evolution.  True, one can always blame the province or Ottawa given that much of this is under provincial or federal jurisdiction but our local municipal leaders to date have ignored the long term picture painted by this evolution.  After all, it is a complicated and overwhelming set of circumstances.

 

Of course the trend to more regional services is also a function of the claim that Thunder Bay has under counted its population and more services need to be provided to service this under counted population.  But how can you provide more services if you do not know how many people there are? After all, on the one hand there are claims made by some municipal candidates we are losing people “daily” to other cities but at the same time there are apparently tens of thousands more people here who need services.  Which is it?  Unfortunately, social surveys based on self-reporting and life stories however compelling and reflective of reality do not a rigorous estimate make.   

 

At minimum you would think we could put an estimate together ourselves based on local and regional electricity use from Synergy,  cell phone and phone subscriptions from TBayTel, patient counts (given they have addresses or OHIP cards) from medical facilities in the region, and school enrollments from all the public boards.  These should be correlated with population growth and enable an estimate with upper and lower bounds keyed to census benchmarks.  In the absence of this, one ultimately has to accept the Census results which do say that according to the 2021 census, the number of Indigenous residents of the Thunder Bay Census Metropolitan Area grew by about 12 per cent between 2016 and 2021, to a total of 17,000 people.

 

And so, what next?  Well, one suspects that after a honey moon period of sunny optimism,   it will be business as usual for the next council accompanied with a fairly hefty tax increase.  All the candidates acknowledge a lot of issues ranging from roads to crime to  homelessness to mental health to opioid addiction.  They don’t agree with increasing what taxpayers pay when it comes to revisiting the Turf facility and want to explore alternatives  like donations and fundraising but in the end they will solve problems by “taking action” and “working tirelessly” which usually means a tax increase as a starting point under the banner of investing in ourselves and then avoiding constituents when they complain too much. 

 

Nevertheless, hope springs eternal.  Maybe this council will be different.

 

 

Thunder Bay's Mayoral Race: A Momentum Shift?

 

TBNewswatch has now done two online polls of the day asking respondents to indicate their preference for mayor.  The August 20^th poll was at the start of the race just after nominations closed and they showed Ken Boshcoff out as the clear frontrunner with a majority of the votes cast (51.9 percent).  In second place then was Peng You at 20.4 percent followed by Gary Mack at 17.3 percent.  Going forward to October 8^th, as of approximately 12 noon there had been a total of 1,552 ballots cast and the results show that Ken Boshcoff still appears headed to take the mayor’s chair with about 40 percent of the vote.  In second place is now Gary Mack with about 25 percent of the vote followed by Peng You at 24 percent.  Clint Harris and Robert Szczepanski come in next at 6.6 and 4.5 percent respectively.  These results are summarized in Figure 1 and the results for the October 8^th poll may change slightly as they were not yet final but after over 20 hours of online responding one suspects they will not change a great deal.

 

 

 

In terms of what has transpired, the clear majority of respondents in support of Ken Boshcoff at the dawn of the race has eroded somewhat as the campaign as progressed but he is still poised to take the mayor’s chair given the ground that has to be covered by the next two closest candidates – Mack and You.  Moreover, the fact is that they appear pretty evenly balanced in terms of support.  This is only an online poll with all of its attendant flaws and the only poll that counts is of course on election day but the two strongest candidates aside from Ken Boshcoff appear to have evenly split their support.  However, there is an additional dynamic and that is illustrated in Figure 2. 

 

 

In terms of the change percentage point share in candidate shares, the momentum since August 20^th appears to be in the Mack camp as his share has grown by 7.6 percentage points.  The You support has nevertheless  grown by 4 percent while Szczepanski has increased by 1.5 percent.  This growth appears to have been accompanied by a shift away from both Harris and Boshcoff with the later seeing the greatest percentage point decline. 

 

There are still nearly two weeks to go and it will be interesting to see if the mayoral race in Thunder Bay becomes a more competitive horse race with a photo finish.

Saving Data: The Canadian Regional Historical Wealth Microdata Collection

 

As an economic historian, much of my work involved the collection and analysis of individual level and regional wealth data from late 19^th and early 20^th century central Canada.  This work began in the 1980s with my thesis on wealth in Wentworth County under Peter George at McMaster and became a long term career project that used probate and census data to look at the determinants of Canadian wealth holding as well as its distribution.  After 30 years, the responsible thing to do was to try and find a home for the data and in this regard I am delighted to announce that after conversations with Sara Janes at the Lakehead University Library Archives, a home has been found for the data collection and it has migrated so to speak.  While the full electronic access to the data files is still in progress, the collection now has an entry point.  A fuller description of the data set is available at the Archives site.

 

The data in the Canadian Regional Historical Micro Data Collection consists of over 12,000 probated decedents in Ontario and Manitoba for the period spanning approximately 1870 to 1930.  In terms of the components housed at the Lakehead University Library and Archives, there are:

 

1)    Canadian Historical Regional Micro-Data Collection: Survey Sheets: Approximately 12,000 estate files recorded on 3 to 5-page survey sheets (8” by 11”) comprising approximately 25 linear feet of material.

2)    Canadian Historical Regional Micro-Data Collection: E-Files: 11 sets of e-files in excel format with accompanying coding information, approximately 30 MB of data.

3)    Canadian Historical Regional Micro-Data Collection: Microfilm Resources: Several boxes of microfilm of estate files for Ontario in 1892 and 1902 and the Thunder Bay District, 1885 to 1930. Note that these will become part of the Northern Studies Resource Centre collection of the Paterson Library.

 

 

The work involving data collection and research has occurred over more than 30 years starting in the late 1980s with thesis research for a PhD in Economics at McMaster University, Hamilton and then occupying the bulk of an academic career at Lakehead University.  Along with the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship that funded the PhD (1986-1990) and the collection of the original Wentworth County estate files, there were three additional SSHRC Standard Research Grants (1991-94; 1999-02 and 2007-10) which helped put together the rest of the data. 

 

The historical probate wealth micro data was collected for four regional areas: they are Wentworth County, Ontario (1872-1927), Thunder Bay District, Ontario (1885-1927), Ontario (1892, 1902) and Manitoba (1873-1927).  Along with over 12,000 estate files collected in hard copy survey sheets which are now housed in the Lakehead University Archives, there are electronic data sets that have been generated that will eventually be available through hyperlinks through the provincial Permafrost digital data preservation system.  Much of the wealth and asset information as well as personal information on the survey sheets has been placed in Excel spread sheets.  Variables include gender, occupation age at death, wealth, portfolio composition, religious affiliation, birthplace, etc…However, there was substantial anecdotal and personal information taken down as well as details on bequests and estate division that was never coded and inputted and is still available in the paper-based survey forms.  There is still research that can be done by coding and inputting the estate division details and subsequently analyzing it.  While some preliminary work was done with Wentworth County in this regard and available for Wentworth County 1872 to 1892, funding for this last stage never materialized and remains undiscovered country. These decedents are also a potential resource for anyone doing genealogical research.

 

So, this is a preliminary message. When the data links are fully up and running, I will do another post.  Until then, if there are questions about accessing the collection including the electronic data in advance of full hyperlink access, they can be directed to Sara Janes at the Lakehead University Archives [sjanes1@lakeheadu.ca (807) 343-8272].  Again, my thanks to the Lakehead University Archives for helping preserve this data for future research work.