Notes from Northern Ontario

What a small Canadian city can teach America

My wife is from Thunder Bay, a city of around 130,000 on the banks of Lake Superior, in northern Ontario not far from the Minnesota border. I’m no expert on its history or its current condition, but we visit at least twice a year. Having just returned for maybe the 20th time, I have a few thoughts about this place and about cities and suburbs more generally, including what smaller metro areas can teach us in the era of superstar cities.

Photo by Jaime Dantas on Unsplash

Setting the stage

Thunder Bay is a fascinating place; it emerged as a fur trading hub and then expanded into a center for paper mills, grain transport, and manufacturing, as well as mining-related employment. Some of these industries are shadows of their former selves, while others continue to do reasonably well or thrive. There’s an old downtown that’s experiencing a partial revival — there are two downtowns, actually, because the modern city represents the consolidation of Port Arthur and Fort William — but most of the metro area is suburban sprawl characterized mainly by strip malls, chain restaurants, Walmarts and the like.

The area’s 20th-century growth spurt was fueled by European immigrants eager to do manual labor. Many of them left Finland — giving Thunder Bay the planet’s largest Finnish community outside Finland — and many others, like my wife’s family, came from Italy. In my first few trips there, I found it funny that people would travel by the thousands to an exceedingly cold place with few of the intrinsic charms of their home country. I should’ve realized what’s obvious now: that Italians didn’t leave thriving little villages but deep rural poverty, arriving in a relative land of plenty (and, for what it’s worth, a place that’s beautiful in its own way). This is the exact same story that explains immigration almost anywhere at almost any time in history: People flee scarcity and war to find economic opportunity, and they find a way to hold tight to the pieces of their culture that they hold dear while acclimating to the new. The U.S. and Canada have always been especially good at receiving newcomers, and these days, the Canadian Dream is every bit as real as the American one. In some respects, it might even be in better shape.

Interestingly, Italians of a certain age in Thunder Bay identify more loudly and proudly as culturally Italian than those I’m acquainted with in New York. Perhaps this is merely a function of when they arrived, but it could be more than that. It may be, for instance, that the likelihood that people and families will nurture their ethnic identity grows when they’re among a critical mass of people in a smaller community, as opposed to among people from every corner of the planet at all times. It’s my wife’s parents who came over, and they generally still speak the language of their home country to one another. There’s a palpable strength to the cluster. Though their kids and their kids’ kids have assimilated as successive generations always do, they too seem to have abiding respect for Italian traditions.

At the same time, Thunder Bay is the gateway to Northern Ontario, meaning it’s the urban hub where many of the First Nations people who live further north come for basic services. As a result, the metro area has the highest native population of any metro area I’ve ever visited. This might not be notable except for the fact that indigenous people also disproportionately live in poverty and struggle with addiction and other health problems. Plenty of white people spend their days trying to make lives better for Natives and other underprivileged Canadians; some harbor resentment toward the underclass; and surely these Venn diagram circles overlap.

Thunder Bay also happens to be among the most dangerous cities in Canada. Its violent crime rate is about 2,000 per 100,000 people — far higher than similarly sized U.S. cities (though there are methodological reasons it’s hard to compare this apples to apples) — and its homicide rate is more than 5 per 100,000 people, similar to that in similar-sized cities. That said, the place is largely suburban, and crime doesn’t feel top-of-mind to most people. (In contrast, I grew up in the suburbs of Miami when that city was the murder capital of America, and I heard sirens and tales of home-invasion robberies all the time.)

Compare and contrast

So, what about those lessons? I offer a few with real humility, because there’s a lot that I don’t know.

First: Despite its struggles, this Rust Belt–like Canadian city feels less defeated than its American analogues — or at least, the stereotype of those places. Why might that be? One theory is that public infrastructure in modest Canadian cities is more robust than in their U.S. counterparts. Thunder Bay’s parks, playgrounds, and libraries are excellent. The newly developed waterfront is too. And the middle-class professionals I’ve met — teachers, health-care workers — seem to enjoy better pensions than their American peers.

Another reason might be that Thunder Bay is unusually well-endowed with regional infrastructure: a university, a hospital — more than a city of its size would normally expect. There’s nothing else for hundreds of miles, so it becomes a gravitational center, drawing capital, people, and energy from the surrounding region. Or maybe American small cities just suffer get a rap they don’t deserve. We stereotype them as tragic like Youngstown or as punchlines like Scranton in the Office. Perhaps many are doing better than a lot of us think.

There’s a related idea about recent immigration, which has given this small and aging city, built on earlier waves of 20th-century immigration, new life just as it continually does larger cities like New York. In 2019, the Globe and Mail was decrying Thunder Bay’s “faded mosaic”; these days, people from the other side of the world are seemingly everywhere you turn. Southeast Asians in particular are behind the counter at commercial establishment after commercial establishment; the same is true in health care. Alongside Tim Hortons and Boston Pizza, there are African markets and places to get Pho or Korean barbecue. At a local farmer’s market, my older daughter got a very good Filipino empanada.

One evening, my wife and younger daughter found ourselves at a small park where some older men and women of Scottish descent in kilts were playing bagpipes. The small crowd included African immigrant kids playing soccer and women in traditional Muslim garb. “Only in America,” someone might have said, especially before Trumpism became ascendant here. This kind of happy, quiet mixing still happens in the United States, of course, but it happens in lots of other places too, and it’s wonderful to witness.

As far as I can gather, much of this is the result of national and provincial policies that try to match businesses and cities with the people they need to grow. The Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot in particular and a successor program have brought and continue to bring lots of people to the area.

Speaking of which, the housing theory of everything survives a trip to Thunder Bay. The area, dominated by single-family homes, is now seeing its share of apartment developments to try to take the sting out of rising home prices, especially for young people. There’s some grousing about the new developments, but there is clearly a crying need for more places for people to live. At least some Thunder Bay immigrants — international students attending Lakehead University, the numbers of which had grown sharply in the past decade — struggled so badly to find places to live, the government reduced the number of permits available to bright young people looking to study there.

As I left Thunder Bay, I found myself thinking about character, culture and community. Amidst the aforementioned strip malls and A&Ws and Burger Kings and Walmarts, there are also plenty of local bakeries and coffee shops and craft breweries and people playing music and making art and crafts (and, as I mentioned earlier, ethnic restaurants). Culture is a bit more difficult to find than on the streets of a big city, but it’s there, and no less real, because producing and experiencing interesting and beautiful things is a basic human need. On his 19th birthday in a hotel in Thunder Bay (then Fort William), Neil Young recorded “Sugar Mountain.” (And for those who don’t need their culture in physical space, the internet has delivered everything everywhere all at once.) I could probably never leave New York because of the serendipity of its street life, but New Yorkers who scoff at other places as hopelessly boring generally aren’t looking hard enough.

And community? In New York City, the daily rhythms of life and the casual connections that go along with those rhythms sustain many of us psychologically. On the subway or when pushing a kid on the swings in the playground, we talk to someone we know or don’t know for five or 20 minutes, and even if we don’t realize it, it makes our day. In a place like Thunder Bay, though these encounters are far more scarce, other interactions seem to happen more often: Families and friends come and visit for 30 minutes, an hour or more at a time. That brings with it the promise if not the reality of deeper connectivity. Of course, these types of relationships sustain many big-city people too, and of course, isolation is a huge problem in small cities and suburbs, but perhaps it’s no coincidence that Thunder Bay, at least the way my family experiences it, has simultaneously less street life and more meaningful human connections. (I hasten to add again that I may be over-extrapolating from the experience of one family.)

Here’s a last, admittedly off-topic political observation that’s consistent with this week’s New York magazine cover story: Canadians are indeed mad as hell about how Donald Trump is jerking them around. While tariffs are almost always stupid economic policy, they make at least a little bit of sense where the U.S. can claim that another country is flooding ours with goods produced by cheap labor or inordinate levels of government support, as in the case of China or Mexico. In Canada’s case, our good neighbor to the north, like us in so many ways, is buying loads of stuff from us at fair prices while selling us things we want and need: petroleum, paper, comedy, children’s television and so on. This is the way international economics is supposed to work — but to the current American president, every deal is an opportunity to play the victim.