Quote:
Originally Posted by TbayON
I tend to be a believer in Councillor Larry Hebert's unaccounted Thunder Bay community (he believes there could be as many as 25 000 more people using city services than our population figures suggest). I don't know that the number is that high, but he did base his assessment based on statistical analysis, not just opinion.
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My personal estimate is that the number of uncounted people in the city is between 5,000 to 12,500 at any time. It would swell during periods where you've got university students (typically not counted in the census but they do impact city services and the law requires the city to actually count their numbers when designing municipal ward boundaries), northern First Nations and regional people coming to town for grocery shopping or healthcare or education, as well as tourists being in the city.
There is also the fact that over 3,000 people live in Gorham/Ware/Fowler and the Whitefish River Valley, and they have an impact on the local economy, but they're not included in the CMA because they're not established municipalities.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TbayON
As for the stagnation of Northern Ontario as a whole, one only needs to look at some recent numbers released by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce. Production of real tangible goods in Ontario has fallen 12% in recent years... and that is Northern Ontario's bread & butter (mostly resource based). The financial sector has saved Ontario from total economic despair. Northern Ontario needs to find a new globally competitive goods production 'scheme' and the federal and provincial governments need to push new Canadians to places outside the major Canadian CMAs in order to promote growth in Northern Ontario.
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We don't
need population growth to be economically viable, but we do need a decent amount of people between 18 and 40 and a reliable supply of jobs. Honestly, if the population were to drop a little, but most people were reasonably well employed and satisfied, I'd say the city would be doing better in that scenario than one where the population is growing, but jobs are scarce and quality of life is low. I think the city is doing a fair amount of effort into ensuring the former: simply maintain the labour force and jobs, maintain the population to 110,000 (+/- 5,000), and work on improving local cultural amenities to make life enjoyable here. In an ideal situation, we would only really need to bring people in to replace skilled workers that have retired that the local market can't supply.
Long story short: I think based on the big picture the region isn't terribly fucked, we just need a bit of creativity and should focus on maintaining the population and improving quality of life over growing the population at any expense.
We do have to accept that some of the smaller towns are going to become obsolete and become ghost towns (it happens, look at Jackfish), but at the same time, those towns can become specialized (like Nipigon-Red Rock and Elliot Lake as retirement communities, Kenora as a cottage country) or reinvigorated (like Red Lake with Goldcorp and Terrace Bay or White River with their sawmills). We can't be propping up small communities with no viable industry, so we have to find ways to make them viable or find a way to "retire" them without hurting the few people who remain.
It's going to be interesting, once later census reports are released, to see how many people have moved to new communities
within Northern Ontario. Because we've seen a lot of communities shrink and a lot of them grow, often in strange patterns where the two are beside each other (Nipigon-Red Rock and Schreiber-Terrace Bay) where one grew and the other shrank, and I have a feeling that it's a result of people within Northern Ontario following jobs around.