You probably think you live in Northern Ontario. According to Statistics Canada there is no Northern Ontario, just Ontario. If you are attached to your identity as a citizen of Northern Ontario, you don’t exist.
Prince Edward Islanders exist statistically even though there are fewer of them than there are Sudburians. Nunavitians exist statistically, even though there are fewer people in Nunavit than in Timmins, and less than half as many as in Sault Ste. Marie.
There is more: according to Statistics Canada, most of the people of Northern Ontario are actually southerners.
In 2000, the Geography Division of Stats Can published a study by Chuck McNiven and Henry Puderer. After much thought they decided North begins north of the boreal forest. South includes the narrow band where most Canadians live. Everything in between is the transition zone. What we think of as “Northern Ontario” is just the transition zone, and most of us are not in it.
Industry Canada and the Canadian Press also agree that Northern Ontario does not exist. Both instruct writers not to capitalize “compass points” unless they have political, historical or other connotations. Northern Ontario is not supposed to be capitalized. It has no political, historical or other connotations. Government and the media agree Northern Ontario is about as real as Leprechauns.
There is a legal basis for your non-existence.
The Robinson Treaty was about extinguishing any political rights for the people of the northern territories. The treaty read “.. said Chiefs do hereby fully, freely, and voluntarily surrender, cede, grant, and convey unto Her Majesty … all their right, title, and interest to, and in the whole of, the territory above described, save and except the reservations..”
Once the treaty was signed, the region was legally empty with a few minor exceptions. The provincial government made money selling off its new real estate to would-be farmers, and timber rights and mineral rights to family and friends.
The Empty North was a politically useful theme in southern Ontario. It even became part of Canada’s official art movement, the Group of Seven. Their northern landscapes were always conveniently empty. Real art copied political fiction.
The southern fantasies weren’t completely consistent, according to Sharon Wall. Wall has written a strange book about Northern Ontario called “The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, Antimodernism, and Ontario Summer Camps, 1920–55.” When they had to admit there were people in the North, Wall says, southerners imagined the region as a “the home of uncultured immigrants, working - class radicalism, and sexual immorality.” When I told an audience in Thunder Bay about this someone yelled, “sounds pretty good to me!”
But there is a political downside to this image of the Northerner. Wall quotes Karen Dubinsky, author of “Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929.” Dubinsky’s book is actually about “women, men, and sexual crime in rural and northern Ontario,” not Ontario as a whole. Dubinski explains how prejudice and politics were connected: “Those attempting to fashion mining settlements and logging enclaves into towns and cities in the north had continually to deflect and reshape criticism of the region as a wild and immoral netherland.”
Because we are crude, radical and highly sexualized, we aren’t civilized enough to run our own affairs. Northern Ontario really has to be run by the grown-ups in southern Ontario. These prejudices make it very convenient for a southern government to trade away northern resources. Colonial governments all over the world told themselves their subjects were inferior. Pretending to protect the childlike natives, the colonizers would rip off the natural wealth of their colony.
It was called the “White Man’s Burden.”
We know that colonial practices prevent economic development, whether in Africa, Nunavit or Northern Ontario. Colonial practices are supported by denial and prejudice. That’s why economic development in Northern Ontario may depend on confronting the hidden attitudes that are keeping the North down.
