Construction

There is another visible sign of how much Elliot Lake’s economy has changed. A once-popular drinking hole of uranium miners – and one of the town’s original buildings – was demolished to make way for a drug store.

Rhona Guertin likes to think of the next evolution of Elliot Lake Retirement Living as being in the "people importation" business.

With mining-related activity due to create as many as 1,000 new jobs, Kirkland Lake will need 100 new houses built every year for the next six years just to keep pace, according to an Ottawa-based consultant.

Sioux Lookout has always prided itself on being the "Hub of the North." Economic development officer Florence Bailey doesn’t want to change that moniker. Instead, she wants to find ways to enhance it.

The company in charge of operating the Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan is setting its sights on a decidedly less dangerous environment: mining in Northern Ontario.

The province’s new focus on enhancing business access to wood and biomass is keeping one Timmins heavy equipment sales and service firm hopeful it may provide a financial shot in the arm to the industry.

A string of construction-related deaths in Toronto and Ottawa through the winter months have sparked the creation of a provincial task force to examine health and safety, providing industry with cautious hope future tragedies may be prevented.

For the fourth straight year, the City of North Bay topped previous years with another all-time record for building permits. The value of permits issued by the city in 2009 hit a record of $92 million, which bested the 2008 record of $84.4 million.

The global economic downturn failed to make much of a dent on Timmins’ construction industry through 2009, which had another banner year. With $42.

The North American steel industry may be in the dumper but that doesn’t mean jobs aren’t available. In Sault Ste. Marie, when jobs become available it doesn’t take long for word to circulate.