It's time for the cities to step up to the plate. Literally. The economics of Northern Ontario depends on what Thunder Bay, Sudbury, North Bay, the Sault, and Timmins dish out.
We need to hire a world-class, all-star Northern Ontario Super-Chef to discover and define a really exciting Northern Ontario cuisine. Salary would be a minimum of $200,000 a year. The position would be good for one or two years and then we get another star. The project should run for five or six years. Total cost? Could be as much as two million dollars.
The economic theory is pretty simple. Tourism is an export industry with a difference – the customers have to pick up the product in person. To get people to come, they have to have the place in mind. There is no Northern Ontario in the minds of the touring public around the world.
Nothern Ontario is a blank spot on the world’s mental map. There is no Northern Ontario culture. There is no Northern Ontario architecture. There is no Northern Ontario Cuisine. You can’t sell a cultural wasteland as a high-quality tourist destination.
Our approach to tourism is based on the 1940 U.S. interstate highway model – the government builds roads and the locals build motels. That model is dead.
To be a destination you have to have place value and people value. We have a lot of potential place value – wonderful wild assets close to a very big U.S. market. The environmental attributes could make Superior's North Shore the next big recreational frontier.
What we lack is people value. Autralians Caribbeans and Latin Americans all have identities in the world culture.
Even Siberia is an exotic place. All the world knows about the people in Northern Ontario is that there might be “Indians." Northern Ontarians don’t exist.
Creating a regional cuisine is the cheapest and fastest way to get recognizable people-value. It won’t do miracles, but it gets the ball rolling. A one-time investment produces something that can be used for years. By comparison, an advertising campaign is a waste of money – we have to spend the same money again next year. It makes far more sense to invest in real culture.
But who should make the first move? Given our Northern political culture, the obvious thing to do is ask the provincial government to fund a project. That might work. The danger is that we get the “swing as engineering designed it” (google that phrase and go to images). Or we could just do the job now.
The Super Chef has to be located in one of the cities, so it should be the big city councils that makes a move. Smaller towns don’t have the base of restaurants, events and media to work with. If one city unilaterally funded the first year it would would get a head start in building its brand. Leadership pays. A single heroic city council member could launch the process with a motion to contribute to the Super-Chef project. With one city committing, the Super–Chef project would be cooking.
The Super-Chef’s job description would include developing a recipe book, designing menus for special events and attending events in restaurants and lodges around the North. Anything that makes the Chef famous will also promote northern development. Council’s job description would include holding a banquet for politicians, encouraging restaurants and clubs to hold dinner events and food festivals. Council meetings could begin with new northern hors d’oeuvres.
The big ideas here is that Northern Ontario can put itself on the map by discovering itself. Northerners have to see themselves as an interesting people, and they have to play up the parts of their common culture that the rest of the world will find interesting.
Once the Super-Chef project has been rolled out, we can go on to harder jobs – identifying the architecture, the art, the literature of the North. We can start rebuilding a rail system that makes Northern communities accessible. We can start redefining Northern cities as as gateways to the smaller communities, as allies to the small towns, as champions of Northern development.
(The Super-Chef idea comes from Kirsten Robinson)
Dave Robinson is an economist with the Institute for Northern Ontario Research at Laurentian
University.
drobinson@laurentian.ca
