Arrested Development: A Brief Economic History of Northern Ontario, 1870 to 2020

Abstract

ABSTRACT Northern Ontario’s economy began as a booming nineteenth-century resource frontier because of international market demand for natural resource commodities, private sector business investment, and government initiatives in transportation and protectionism. During northern Ontario’s development, economic growth was most robust during eras when these engines came together to provide economic growth and employment creation. Export-led growth approaches to development suggest that such a growth process ultimately expands population and market size and creates self-sustaining economic growth. However, northern Ontario never made that transition because of the inability to retain more linkages from resource extraction because of decision-making external to the region. As a result, the latter part of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century became an era of arrested development. Economic decline since the 1970s caused by less labor-intensive transportation and resource sectors was met with ineffective and essentially palliative government attempts to counter the decline.