Merry Christmas
Green Dreams
Canada says 20% of new passenger cars, pickup trucks and SUVs must be electric as of 2026. Dream on. Electric vehicle sale are now just 7 per cnet of total sales. Prices are high and sales are strong in Quebec and British Columbia, which both have cheap electricity and high subsidies for electric cars. Not so much elsewhere.
Electric cars are expensive. The Federal Government subsidies on electric cars only go to vehicles whose base model costs less than C$55,000, though it will allow add one to the base medal to go up to $65,000. A complicated envy-driven policy so as not to be seen subsidizing `rich’ people. Almost all gas powered pickup up trucks cost more than C$65,00. Electric cars cost less to run— little maintenance and in most places cheap Canadian electricity.
The unintended consequence of forcing car makers to go electric
Car makers will switch to making high end luxury gasoline powered models, because they are so profitable. That will leave Canadians at the lower end of the income scale without cheaper cars to buy.
If you can find them.
Wait times for electric vehicles. I put a down payment on an electric car but when I was told that the wait time was a year and half, I cancelled. A lot can happen to car technology in a year and a half.
Here is a wait list compiled by the Toronto Star as of November 1, 2022. BEV stands for Battery Electric Vehicle, in other words, all electric. PHEV are plug-in hybrids, which still have gasoline motors along with a battery
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Elon Musk’s Woes
It looks as if buying Twitter was not a great idea. Maybe it will come around, but in the meantime Elon Musk has gone from techno-genius to pariah in short order. He has had to sell Tesla stock, the source of his immense riches. When the principal shareholder is bailing, it is not a good sign. The stock continues to fall, and it was down 8% on Thursday alone. Here is the chart for the year to date.
Tesla Giveth and Tesla Taketh Away
Should I buy Tesla now that the stock is down? Tesla is the favourite stock of small investors, topping Apple, which is near a recent low, proving that amateurs are usually wrong.. The pros? They don’t like Tesla. Here is one money manager’s take:
“Tesla (TSLA) – Just because it’s come up… “with the stock down this much, should we be looking to buy Tesla?”. No. Good god, no. This remains a car company. At first glance, the price where I might start to think about thinking about looking at it is still about 70% below the current price.”
Tesla was once just about the only serious electric car maker. Now the big players are piling in. Hyundai of South Korea is selling out its Ioniq 5, an all electric SUV and has orders for the sleeker Ioniq 6, a sedan. Tesla still sells, but it is no longer alone.
Back to The 1970s in Britain
“Only call 999 if you think you are about to die.” That advice from a man who runs one of the Britain’s ambulance services, hit by a strike. One of the union leaders said it is not the fault of the union if people die during the strike.
The ambulance workers could be back this week. Nurses and railway workers also off.
It brings back memories of the strikes in Britain in the 1970s, when Britain was reduced to operating a three day week because of power cuts.
Out when Prime Minister Ted Heath, remembered by younger people as the taxman of the Beatles song.
The result of that was Margaret Thatcher, elected in 1979, bringing in anti-union laws and more than a decade of Convective rule.
Another work-to-rule
Britain still on Innovation Index
Indian States Population Compared to Countries
Essay of Week
It’s Christmas and then Boxing Day so I figure you have a little bit more time to read. This is the long first chapter of a book I wrote on the Dellelce family of Sudbury. It starts by telling the story of Sudbury in Northern Ontario and weaves in the histories of several Italian families who moved there in the early part of the 20th century.
Sudbury: Boomtown to Northern Capital
Sudbury was built by some of the richest people in the world, such as the American financier J.P. Morgan, and by some of the poorest, Italian immigrants like Tommaso Dell’Elce, Rachelina Masciangelo, Beniamino Scagnetti and Cristina Della Vedova.
J.P. Morgan was the most powerful man on Wall Street in the Robber Baron era, and the bank bearing his name still exists. At the suggestion of US Steel, Morgan and others put together the firm that became the International Nickel Company (Inco). There were many mines in the Sudbury basin at the time, with names such as Frood, Canadian Copper, and British American Nickel. By the time Morgan was finished, there would be just two main companies: the mighty International Nickel (Inco), the largest nickel producer in the world, and its smaller rival, Falconbridge.
In 1914, at the start of the First World War, in towns such as Garson and Levack, immigrants from Italy and other parts of Europe sought a new life. Nickel is used to harden artillery shells, and nickel production from the Sudbury mines more than doubled from 1914 to1918, as did copper production, with the carnage in Europe driving the demand. The European newcomers working in and around the mines created the raw material that was killing people fighting in the Alps between Austria and Italy, and on the fields of France and Belgium.
Copper and nickel, then and now, are key in both peace and war. Copper is said to be the metal with a PhD in economics, since its price often predicts recessions and recoveries. Both metals produced prosperity and growth in Sudbury.
“Italians started coming when nickel was discovered in the late 1800s—1880 is when Inco found the first deposits. The history of the immigration of the Italians into Sudbury is really linked to the discovery of nickel,” says Diana Iuele-Colilli, a professor at Laurentian University who has researched and written on the Italian influence in Sudbury.
The mines made Sudbury, and for much of the twentieth century the mines were Sudbury. They were the reason European immigrants flocked to the area. The city is still very European and its ethnic diversity is much different from the rest of the province of Ontario. It is more French, and it is more European, though each nationality staked out its own territory at first.
“The immigration to Sudbury reflects very much the development of the area. The city developed much later, the Italian community immigrated to Copper Cliff first; it’s the most established Italian enclave in Sudbury,” says Professor Iuele-Colilli.
“If you get a chance to drive through Copper Cliff while you’re here, you’ll see Little Italy, and you’ll get a good idea of how the Italians settled there. Copper Cliff was a little mining town back then; it wasn’t annexed to the city until 1976. There was an English town, which was downtown, where the Copper Cliff Club was located. Then, there was Finnish town where the Finns were, and there was Shantytown where the Francophones lived. The Italians were completely cut off from downtown; to get up to Little Italy you had to take the one road in, then go down along the railway, and up and around. It was the only way in, and the only way out.”
Demand for minerals from 1914 to 1918 meant there was lots of work. It was more than nickel and copper that they pulled out of the earth (the town where many Italians settled wasn’t called “Copper Cliff” for nothing). There were also traces of precious metals, such as gold, silver, platinum and palladium, as well as other rare elements, such as cobalt and iridium; all in all a treasure trove unmatched anywhere in the world.
The source of all this wealth was a meteor that slammed in 1.8 billion years ago, thought to be the second-largest ever to hit the planet. It was ten to fifteen kilometres in diameter, even larger than the meteor that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. There are two schools of thought: either the meteor brought those metallic riches from the asteroid belt, or its impact stirred up the metals in the bowels of the earth and brought them to the surface.
It means Sudbury’s nickel deposit is one of the largest in the world, and its deposit is unique in that none of the others occur mixed with sulphur. It is the sulphur that is the source of pollution that pours from the “super stack” at Inco’s smelter, which is the tallest chimney in the western hemisphere, and the same height as the Empire State Building. The main mineral deposit is spread over an area sixty kilometres long and twenty-seven kilometres wide. To take just one example, the Creighton Mine, the deepest mine in Canada, started operation in 1901 and still has enough reserves to last at least another ten or twenty years.
The Canadian Pacific Railway, not the mines, picked the spot where the city is today, and the superintendent of construction on the CPR line, James Worthington, named the construction site “Sudbury” after the pretty town in the English county of Suffolk where his wife was born. The two places couldn’t be more different: the English Sudbury lies on a flat coastal plain, and is so small it could fit into Ramsey Lake, in the middle of Sudbury. The lake was named for another a CPR official, William Ramsey, whose surveying miscalculation is said to have led to Sudbury's precise location.
The CPR was a huge nation-building project, though it wouldn’t be completed until 1885 with the driving of the last spike, in British Columbia. The Northern Ontario stretch was built first, one of the toughest sections of the new railway, carved out of rock and forest. Thousands of men worked building the rail lines that approached Sudbury, coming at it from the east and west. Sudbury was one of the hubs, and while the construction was going it was a wild frontier town.
The first passenger and freight train arrived in Sudbury in December of 1884. As historian C.M. Wallace of Laurentian University recounts in Sudbury: Rail Town to Regional Capital, thousands of construction workers soon left, and there were only two or three hundred souls in the town, a whistle stop like so many others stationed every hundred miles or so, places to take on water and coal for the steam engines. Many of the other railway depots became ghost towns, but Sudbury soon came alive. Mineral riches meant it didn’t stay just a watering stop for long.
The town elected its first mayor, Stephen Fournier, in 1893. But the third mayor embodied perhaps the oddest story of any local politician before or since.
Murray Clement Biggar was mayor in 1895, when there was a bit of a scandal over the awarding of contracts for sewage disposal, water lines and the provision of electricity. Biggar was defeated in the 1896 election by Stephen Fournier. Soon after the election, Biggar disappeared, leaving behind his law practice and his wife and children. There were rumours he had drowned in Ramsey Lake, but in 1898 Sudbury resident Gus Harwood found him living in San Francisco. Biggar had gone to the Yukon to prospect in the Klondike gold rush, but then moved on to San Francisco without even staking a claim.
If he had wanted to make money in mining, he should have stayed in Sudbury. He could have followed the example of Francis Cochrane, first elected mayor in 1898. Cochrane made his fortune developing the McVittie hydroelectric dam and the Frood mine. He went on to be a federal MP and cabinet minister. The town of Cochrane, Ontario, is named for him.
Natives had mined copper in the area, and French missionaries in the seventeenth century told of seeing copper ingots fashioned from local ores by aboriginal miners. Government surveyors came across the huge mineral deposits in the 1850s, but it wasn’t until the building of the CPR that mining was feasible. The area was soon transformed.
By 1885 prospectors were scouring the area and paying for land claims. It was one thing to stake a claim, another to develop a mine. The first major company was the Canadian Copper Company, founded in 1886 by a man from Ohio named Samuel J. Ritchie. He raised $2 million, and, while that wouldn’t buy you the most expensive residential property in Sudbury today, adjusted for inflation it was worth the equivalent of $48 million back then.
Mining wasn’t profitable at first. The copper ore was heavy and transporting it south cut into profits. The copper also occurred with nickel and no one knew how to refine nickel or what to do with it. The first solution was to refine the copper ore on-site, reducing its weight. Then someone discovered that mixing nickel with steel produced a tougher metal, ideal for stainless steel, and, perhaps more important at the time, also ideal for armour plating and artillery shells.
In 1902, J.P. Morgan put together the International Nickel Company, joining Canadian Copper and another firm, Orford Mining, at a cost of $10 million. The booming mines attracted immigrants from around the world to Northern Ontario. Historian Wallace points out there was an ethnic pecking order in terms of who was hired at the mines. “In 1913, for example, the Canadian Copper Company made a concerted effort to hire what it called ‘white men’ from Michigan and Nova Scotia, because it distrusted the non-English-speaking element in the area.”
Wallace says the war intensified the distrust of foreigners, and the conscription crisis, when many French Canadians objected to a mandatory call-up to the Army, bred animosity between English and French.
“In 1918, the all-English-Canadian town council enacted part of that intolerance into municipal law, and imposed a special wartime licence, payable to the Sudbury Patriotic Fund, on businesses operated by non-British subjects. The same bias was also demonstrated in the 1919 council’s decision to reinforce the British image of Sudbury by renaming a number of streets, especially those with German and other ‘unpronounceable’—mostly French—names; du Caillaud Street, for example, was changed to Howey Drive.”
The “foreign” residents, meaning non-British and non-French, made up about 15 percent of the population in the war years, and were 30 percent of the population in the surrounding townships where the Dellelce, Scagnetti and Masciangelo families first lived.
By the middle of the twentieth century, Italians would be the third-largest ethnic group in the area, after Canadians of French and British stock. The story of Sudbury and the Dellelce family is intertwined. The Dellelce family, in particular, sponsored a large number of Italian immigrants, giving them a start in the many businesses they operated.
Sudbury is a world capital in the mining business. On the London Metal Exchange, where prices of copper and nickel are set every weekday, any news of trouble in the Sudbury basin—a strike at one of the mines or a railway stoppage—will send the price of either metal soaring or sinking. While a strike is bad news for Sudbury, it helps anyone who owns nickel or copper, since, if Sudbury’s mines are not producing any, there will be a shortage, and prices will rise.
The city that started as a small railroad town in the late nineteenth century quickly morphed into a giant mining camp, even though, at the start, many of the mines ringed the original settlement in places such as Frood, Copper Cliff, Levack (where the Dellelce family first settled), and Garson (home to the Scagnettis).
“Sudbury has always been the mining capital of this country and that mineral deposit never stops giving,” says Perry Dellelce. “The Sault had steel mills because of the Great Lakes and the locks. Those mills are all finished now. North Bay was timber and Timmins was just too far out of the way. It had a great mining camp, but I think Sudbury has always been the heart of Northern Ontario.”
Stories of the rich mining town spread around the world and attracted immigrants from Europe looking to get the leg up they would never get at home. Nowhere was that truer than in Italy, where a rigid class system wouldn’t allow naturally clever people to rise through hard work, or their children through education and experience.
The Dellelce and Scagnetti families came to Sudbury during the most tumultuous period of the last century: the First World War. There was a huge demand for foreign labour because of the importance of nickel and copper as war materiel, and because so many men from the region were overseas, first as volunteers, then as conscripts.
Sudbury’s British origin and French Canadian populations suffered through a divisive conscription crisis that lasted for many years. Though the new immigrants, the Italians, Finns and Ukrainians, sat on the sidelines of the debate, it dominated elections. The basic issue was that the British Canadians supported the Empire, and French Canadians thought they shouldn’t be involved in what many of them saw as a colonial war. (There was to be a similar conscription crisis in the Second World War.)
The war’s demand for nickel and copper transformed Sudbury into the most important city in Northern Ontario. Nickel production in Sudbury tells the story: it had risen from 34 million pounds in 1911 to 49.9 million pounds in 1913, while copper production went from 18 million to 25.8 million pounds. Then the war came along: misery for the millions of soldiers and civilians slaughtered in Europe, Asia and Africa, but boom times for Sudbury, as the mines in the region saw nickel production from 1914 to 1918 soar from 45.5 to 92.5 million pounds a year, and copper jump from 28.9 to 47 million pounds a year.
The chief beneficiaries of the wartime boom were two firms that no longer exist: Canadian Copper and Mond Nickel, whose profits climbed dramatically, but the British America Nickel Corporation benefited too. In 1916 it became the third big mining firm active in the Sudbury basin.
Mond, a British firm, maintained normal production levels at its newly established Coniston Plant, but by December 1914 it had increased those levels by a third. By April 1915, the market had improved to the extent that Canadian Copper not only rehired men that it had let go, but it expanded. In November 1915, both Canadian Copper and Mond Nickel reduced the workday of all service employees from twelve hours to eight, bringing them in line with the underground workers. All this was done without any reduction in pay, and hourly wages were increased by one third as the companies also hired more men to work above ground.
As the war dragged on there were labour shortages, and the federal government began to bring in hundreds of foreigners, even “enemy aliens,” such as Ukrainians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In February 1917 the company closed two mines in order to transfer men to concentrate on more essential work elsewhere. It was a last-ditch effort to scrape up enough manpower to keep the other mines functioning.
There was a 10 percent bonus for all Canadian Copper hourly workers in 1917, and, in April 1918, Canadian Copper raised the daily wages of all employees by fifty cents. In 1918, Canadian Copper was employing approximately 3,200 men, and Mond more than 1,800.
The armistice in November 1918 brought a bust, not a boom; unemployment soared, and wages fell. The postwar slump saw a depression in 1922, when only 17.5 million pounds of nickel were produced, down from a peak of 92.5 million pounds. Copper took a similar hit.
By this time, Sudbury was served by two transcontinental railways. Canadian Pacific, of course, but also the Canadian Northern Railway, which ran from Quebec City to the Pacific. In 1923, it became one of the several near-bankrupt railways that the federal government took over to form the Canadian National Railway.
Sudbury had a pivotal place in Canadian Pacific’s transcontinental system. Highways followed: in 1911, the government of Ontario started a trunk highway from Sault Ste. Marie to Sudbury to North Bay. The first section was completed in the summer of 1914. By 1917 the people of Sudbury were able to travel all the way to Toronto by car. New telegraph services accompanied the railways. Before 1911, there were only two hundred telephones in Sudbury and Copper Cliff. Long-distance service started in 1911.
In 1910 places like Garson, Creighton, Frood and Levack were simply residential groupings at mines and smelter sites. The 1911 census showed that Sudbury’s population was 4,150. There was a streetcar service, the Sudbury-Copper Cliff Suburban Electric Railway, that took workers back and forth.
Then the Ontario government adopted the Northern and Northwestern Ontario Development Act, that authorized an expenditure of ten million dollars for the construction of essential roads and public works in the area. In June 1913 the town council passed a law directing all vehicles to drive on the right-hand side of the road. The Province of Ontario instituted a mandatory driver’s test on December 1st, 1914.
There was a definite class system in Sudbury. The vast majority of citizens in the industrial towns, such as Garson, fell into the category of working class, whereas other people in the townships of Balfour, Rayside, Blezard and Hanmer were largely farmers. The town of Sudbury had a highly diversified social structure, headed by a growing entrepreneurial class.
Business life in Sudbury was made up mainly of lawyers and small businessmen. There were not many industries apart from the mines. There was some industrial diversification, a flour mill for example, but it failed.
In 1916, the Canadian Copper Company changed its name to the International Nickel Company of Canada. The name change also showed how nickel had become a more important product than copper, and how Sudbury had become the largest nickel-producing area in the world, a distinction it still holds today.
The United States did not join the Allied side in the First World War until April of 1917, almost three years after the war began. Until that time, the International Nickel Company, the American parent of the mine in Sudbury, was not bound by Canadian laws forbidding trading with the enemy. Still, in spite of rumours, the American firm did not ship Canadian nickel to Germany.
There was also the question of sulphur pollution. In 1912, the newly formed Sudbury Horticultural Society was forced to cancel its inaugural show because most of the plants in town had been severely injured by sulphur fumes. The enormous increase in wartime copper production brought with it a corresponding growth in the volume of sulphur pollution. Farmers and local council asked the mining company to roast their ore during the winter months rather than the summer growing season.
From 1910 to 1920, Sudbury’s population doubled. Immigrant groups of various backgrounds expanded, particularly in the district of Donovan, where Tom and Rachelina Dellelce would move their family three decades later.
Cars and trucks had trouble making it over the primitive roads made for horses, so Sudbury started paving its streets around 1914. There were cement sidewalks, and new street lighting in 1914. By December 1916, streetcars ran to downtown Elm and Durham businesses from the Lake District via Nelson and Station Streets, and from Copper Cliff.
A new sewer trunk line was put in in 1913, but it drained directly into Junction Creek on the outskirts of town. That played havoc with Sudbury’s water supply. By 1917, the town’s water system had been modernized: in 1915 a chlorination plant was built, and in 1917 a new steel water tower replaced an old wooden one.
Ben Scagnetti would have taken a horse-drawn wagon from Garson to a local farmers’ market in Sudbury. The town hoped local produce would counter the rising price of food in Canada, and around the world, caused by the war. Ben may have been selling as well as buying, since he packaged blueberries from farmers in the Garson area. He would have been keenly aware of the soaring price of food during the war, and so would the customers at his general store.
From August 1915 until August 1918, the price of food staples rose faster than wages: cream went from twenty-five cents to fifty cents per quart; beef, from twelve cents to twenty-five cents per pound; pork, from fifteen cents to thirty-eight cents per pound, and butter, from thirty cents to forty-five cents per pound.
Catholic immigrants such as the Dellelce, Scagnetti and Masciangelo families meant enrolment at Separate Schools (the politically correct nineteenth-century Ontario name for Roman Catholic schools) tripled during the war. The growth in the number of children mirrored the growth of Sudbury, and the mining industry would be the main employer for the next sixty years.
No one in the Dellelce family tree ever worked underground in the mines. As we have seen, there was class rigidity even in Sudbury; better to be a Protestant or, better still, a Mason to boot, to get ahead in the mines.
“Italians could only go so far at Inco because they were Catholics and Inco was run by Masons,” said the late Peter Crossgrove, whose father was a stationary engineer at Inco, brought over from Scotland. Crossgrove, who owned the President Hotel in Sudbury, was born in nearby Copper Cliff, but went on to an international career as a business consultant. “It was a town of immigrants: Italians, Finns, Scots. It was, and is, a bilingual town because of [the] large French Canadian population.”
There may have been prejudice against Italians and other immigrants at the mines, but the Scagnetti and Dellelce families made their way as entrepreneurs. They prospered by supplying the mines, and the people who worked in them; in the case of the Dellelce family, becoming one of the most successful construction and equipment-leasing firms in the region. Education and experience have left descendants of those original Italian immigrants comfortable, and prosperous.
The Dellelce family, like many immigrant families, believed in investing their money in property, rental properties, hotels and raw land. It is said that the Dellelce family was probably the largest property owner in Sudbury at one time.
“As far as commercial, raw land, they owned as much as anybody. Did they use it for their highest and best use? Certainly not over the long term,” says Perry, who himself still owns property in Sudbury.
The mines are no longer the main driver of employment in Sudbury. In 1978-79 there were 11,600 unionized employees out of work during an eight-month-long strike at Inco; today there are just 4,000 people working at Vale Inco in Sudbury, even though the output of the mines remains the same or higher. Today, much of the work is done by technology, and by smarter mining techniques. There are still many businesses in Sudbury that supply and support the mining industry; it is just that the mines are no longer dominant.
That strike at Inco had a devastating effect on the local economy. Work came to a standstill for the Dellelce family, and for much of its equipment empire. The disruption extended to other small businesses as well: Folly Markle, Diane Dellelce’s sister, remembers giving credit to miners and their families at her grocery store.
The long work stoppage galvanized support for a diversification of Sudbury’s economy. Three years after the end of the strike, the Canada Revenue Agency opened a taxation centre in Sudbury, as the federal government did its bit for Sudbury’s economy.
If Northern Ontario were a separate province, as many of the people who live there think it should be, Sudbury would be its capital. It has developed far beyond mining. Hospitals, universities and colleges are the major employers, along with a large provincial government presence and the federal tax centre.
When the first ancestors of the Dellelce family arrived around 1913, the population of Sudbury was 4,150 (1911 census). The population more than doubled by the time of the next census, in 1921, driven by the mining boom of the First World War, and the arrival of immigrants from around the world.
The population of Greater Sudbury peaked in the early 1970s at 169,580 (1971 census). With the impact of the Inco strike of 1978, and cutbacks at the big mines, the population sank to 152,470 in 1986, but has been climbing ever since to its current 165,700. Today, Greater Sudbury is the twenty-fifth-largest city in Canada, and the tenth-largest in Ontario.
Nothing is perfect, of course. The old downtown, like many old downtowns in Canada, is a bit rundown, because the retail action has moved to the edges. There are vacant storefronts and empty lots, and the old arena is, well, old.
The International Nickel Company once employed 23,000 workers. Today, there are less than a quarter of that number, yet still producing as much nickel, copper, cobalt and precious metals as ever.
Inco’s employee numbers also hit a peak in the 1970s, but dropped sharply after that bitter 1978 strike that lasted 261 days. The mining giant is now owned by a Brazilian company, and is called Vale Inco.
“I don’t know why the government let the Brazilians buy Inco,” said the late Peter Crossgrove, one of the most successful capitalists Sudbury ever produced. He made the comment in his sprawling house on Ramsey Lake, with Inco’s super stack clearly visible in the distance.
Sudbury has grown stronger as its dependence on Inco has shrunk. Other cities in the north have slipped: mining boom towns like Elliot Lake are now retirement villages; North Bay and Sault Ste. Marie were once the hotspots of the north. No more: Sudbury is on top, and by a long shot.
People in the south still think of Sudbury as a mining town ringed by slag heaps. It is, in fact, a place of spectacular beauty. There are 330 lakes in Sudbury, the crown jewel being Ramsey Lake, in the centre of town. Bodies of water pop up where you least expect them: Minnow Lake sits almost hidden from the road behind the Plaza Hotel; Jim Gordon, twice mayor of Sudbury (1976 to 1981, and 1991 to 2000), and a two-term Conservative member of the provincial parliament (MPP) in between, lives on an isolated, pristine lake on the edge of town.
“All that green you see across the lake is all Crown land that will never be developed. It’s Crown land running all the way to Killarney going down towards Parry Sound,” he says.
For a man who lives in a rural paradise, Jim Gordon did a lot for the development of the centre of Sudbury. During his first term as mayor, he lived through the strike at Inco. Though a Conservative, he sided with the workers, and that was instrumental in getting him elected to the provincial legislature, replacing an NDP member. His experience at Queen’s Park (the provincial legislature) gave him a different view of his own city.
“When you have been elected to a post at a higher level of government, you begin to see things in a different way. When I came back as mayor in 1991, I had a provincial view of things; I could see how things really operated in the province. The blinders came off my eyes,” said Gordon.
“I decided that I wanted us [Sudbury] to be a more powerful presence in the north. So, I made a meeting with David Hamilton, the mayor of Thunder Bay at the time, saying I had an idea. We decided that, since there were from 650,000 to 700,000 people living in the north at that time, that we should form a committee of what I called ‘the big city mayors of Northern Ontario.’ We needed to stop being parochial. In that way, we could begin to influence policies at Queen’s Park, and perhaps even federally.”
Those meetings bore fruit. For example, not only is there a major hospital in Sudbury, there is also a medical school, and there is one in Thunder Bay as well. About 70 percent of those graduates, all general practitioners, are staying in the north, reducing the shortage of doctors, a long-time complaint in Northern Ontario. There is also a teaching hospital in Sudbury, and a cancer treatment centre, meaning people don’t have to live in hospices in Toronto when they are receiving treatment.
“We have developed as the health care centre for Northern Ontario. The cancer treatment centre, the medical school, the teaching hospital, and along with those developments, the university has become much more aggressive. The community college, Cambrian, serves Northern Ontario very effectively,” said Gordon.
He also points out that both Liberal and Conservative governments have moved more services to Northern Ontario, and most of those services are operated out of Sudbury.
Gordon doesn’t downplay the importance of the mining sector, but says modernization means people have found other ways to make a living while the overall population has grown. His own father was an immigrant from England who was a mining engineer, studied at the Haileybury School of Mines, and worked for Inco and other mines.
“He was a 100-percent mining man.” So Gordon knows the importance of mining to the north.
“Ironically, the number of men working at Inco and Falconbridge, which are now Vale and Glencore, went steadily down to where, today, there are probably only about five thousand people actually working for those companies directly. But they produce more, and we have had a number of very entrepreneurial men and women who grew up in this city, and who wanted to stay here, and have had great ideas,” said Gordon.
“We now have [companies where] mining machinery parts, which are made here, and actual mining machines are made here, along with some of the dormant Inco mines, which have been taken over by people who felt that they could still mine them. There are probably fifteen thousand people working directly in that business,” he said.
Jim Gordon was a schoolteacher in Sudbury before he was a councillor, and then mayor. He got to know the immigrant communities in the city, and, in particular, the Italians.
“The Italians are very industrious, a hard-working entrepreneurial backbone of the Sudbury economy,” said Gordon. “I knew Nick Dellelce for years. He was a real entrepreneur. At one time, I think he did all the trucking within the Inco complex. His mother was very well known, and she wore the pants. As far as the public was concerned, Mamma Dellelce ruled with an iron hand. She was a formidable matriarch, no doubt about it.”