Last Saturday’s Globe and Mail (February 18, B6) ran an article
titled “Rebuilding Ontario: A Plan for the Way Forward” which laid out a discussion
of Ontario's economic future. For Northerners, all the talk of decline and the
need for diversification was strangely familiar. Indeed, one can best describe what is happening as the
“Northern Ontarioization” of Ontario’s economic discourse as Ontario tries to
decide how to grow its future economy in the wake of the Drummond Report, which
seems to have finally crystallized the fact that Empire Ontario has slipped
into decline. Of course, some of
us saw the eclipse of Ontario a bit earlier than that (check out End of Empire, National Post, February
19, 2005, FP19) but better late than never.
The Globe and Mail described four options for the province to get
its “mojo back”. They were financial services, technology, health care and
natural resources. Missing was that perennial Northern Ontario favorite - tourism. Despite the talk of putting a casino in
Toronto, it is unlikely to see Ontario reinventing itself as Vegas North. Vegas style tourism requires a degree of individual and entrepreneurial freedom that regulatory Ontario is unlikely to acquire anytime soon.
Of all these options, the one most likely to kick start Ontario’s
economy is the natural resource sector. The mining frontier in Ontario’s North
– especially the so-called Ring of Fire- can serve as an investment frontier
for the rest of the province much like mining and forestry did in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century.
However, this does require that the province embrace its North rather
than treat it as a remote relic of the economic past. Here, the contrast is made with Quebec. According to the Globe and Mail:
“Rather than shun its expansive north, Quebec is emphasizing it, hashing out an
ambitious 25-year project dubbed “Plan Nord”. Quebec is betting its future on developing mining, energy
and forestry resources located far north of its major cities. Ontario could
adopt a similar scheme.”
Really? How
interesting. The fact is Ontario
has also developed a Northern Growth Plan – a point the Globe and Mail article seemed
to have missed but then Canada’s “national” newspaper is based in Toronto. Part of what is wrong with Ontario’s
economy is a myopic economic vision that does not look outside of Toronto. Perhaps that is why since the Northern
Growth Plan has been released, all that has resulted is more planning. Given the dominance of
Toronto vision in Ontario and its government, the chromite deposits of the Ring
of Fire could only be developed quickly if they were at the corner of Yonge and
Bloor.
Ontario does not need a growth plan. Ontario needs a set of concrete actions to develop its
northern resource frontier as an investment frontier for the province. The North can be a place for infrastructure
investment and value-added processing that can drive economic growth in
Ontario. The North can be a
frontier for the deployment of Ontario’s labour skills and human capital. Given the capital and technology
intensive nature of modern mining, the North can also be a frontier for high
technology industries. And, the
financial service industry in Toronto got its start in the financing of mining
ventures in Northern Ontario.
Financing new mining ventures in the North can once again be a source of
growth for Toronto’s financial sector.
What is Ontario waiting for?
