Northern Manitoba has been hit hard in recent times.
In the past 10 months, our region has learned that Thompson’s nickel smelter and refinery will cease as planned in 2018, Flin Flon’s 777 mine will close as projected around 2020, and Churchill’s Omnitrax-owned port is shutting down with the accompanying rail service scaled back.
Then this week came the most troubling news yet: Tolko Industries is concluding its operations in The Pas as of Dec. 2.
It’s all terribly sad and unsettling for workers, families and communities. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that Flin Flon is faring well compared to our northern neighbours. For that, we can be thankful.
For northern Manitoba, these announcements will mean the loss of something like 1,400, full-time and seasonal jobs, perhaps more. Even when we throw in the usual qualifier – to my understanding, a fair number of those jobs belong to people of retirement age who will transition into their post-working lives – it’s still a bitter pill for our region to swallow.
“Where is the government?” some people have asked. That is a fair question, but only in the case of Churchill and Omnitrax do we know for certain that a closure could have been averted with government support.
The last provincial government tried its darndest to intervene in the pending smelter and refinery closure in Thompson. So did MP Niki Ashton, who got American filmmaker Michael Moore to say awful things about nickel miner Vale in a bizarre bid to change the company’s mind.
In another needlessly adversarial manoeuvre, provincial politicians, including then-premier Greg Selinger, characterized Vale’s closure announcement as a “fight” between them and the company.
Unfortunately for the people caught in the middle of these shenanigans – the workers and families who depend on those jobs – the fight amounted to Selinger shadow-boxing in an otherwise empty ring.
The reality is that Vale had announced years earlier that it would eventually shift smelting and refining to a plant in Newfoundland and Labrador. Had those same politicians been paying attention at that time, perhaps they could have developed a meaningful plan for Thompson instead of concocting imaginary battles.
In Flin Flon, the eventual closure of 777 mine also has nothing to do with government policy. That was obvious even last year as Cliff Cullen, then the provincial PC mining critic, issued a misbegotten news release that tried to subtly link the mine’s pending demise to NDP policy.
As for Tolko, the company made a point of saying its decision to leave The Pas is “in no way a reflection” of the provincial government, local government or the community. Could the province still come to the rescue of The Pas? If there’s any hope left, they have a duty to do just that.
None of this is to ignore the fact that federal, provincial and local governments can and should be doing more to ensure a stronger business and industrial environment in northern Manitoba.
The new PC government in particular must play an active role given that it campaigned so heavily on a strategy to bolster economic development in this region.
It is also crucial that all levels of government begin to see opportunity in this region beyond the traditional resource-based industries. Politicians’ promises of a rich and prosperous north are not panning out under this paradigm.
These are challenging times for northern Manitoba, but with more support perhaps a powerful new vision of possibility can emerge.
Local Angle is published on Fridays.
