With virtually every piece of market research we
have conducted within our company, you tell us forcefully to write
shorter articles. You are busy.
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You want useful snippets, not novels. You don’t
have much time and you want to maximize it. You have media in your
face every day from
television to the Internet to billboards in
washrooms.
“Keep me interested or I will abandon you,” our
readers say.
In keeping with your advice, I wrote a novel in
the September issue of Northern Ontario Business. Actually, it was
worse than that. It was a two-page 5,000-word open letter to the
mayors of Northern Ontario about turning their municipal priorities
on their heads.
Anyway, against all odds or at least all surveys,
there seemed to be a lot of interest. The article highlighted a
number of ideas—you can find it on the Internet at
www.northernontariobusiness.com if you missed it—but two things
caught my eye since that piece that confirmed my suspicions.
In the last issue I wrote about Northern Ontario
cities missing the boat on immigration policies. A few days later a
Bhutanese immigrant, Brim Subba, wrote a letter to The Globe and
Mail headlined Why I left Toronto to find Canada. He said some
things old white guys like me would say at their peril for fear of
being misunderstood, but he was spot on the money.
Here is part of what he said. “After 10 months in
Toronto, my family…moved to Peterborough, Ont. It may not have
world-class museums, galleries, entertainment venues and
restaurants, but it has what we’re looking for as recent
immigrants—the established Canada and established Canadians.”
He goes on to say, “When we arrived in Toronto,
what struck us most was the absence of a model culture that we
might adopt in order to fit in.”
What he found was a city full of people
straddling two cultures. He didn’t know if he had arrived in
Portugal or Italy from his vantage point around Dufferin and
Dupont.
He found it unsettling. He wanted to go to where
he thought Canada started.
The point is this: we live in a part of Canada
that many immigrants visualize in their mind’s eye. You know, the
beautiful open spaces, the French-English history, the former
colony made good.
What they find is this fantastic experiment in
multicultural diversity, which is fabulous and, in fact,
fantastically unique and Canadian in its soul. But it is not
everybody’s cup of tea.
These people don’t get past our major cities. The
problem is we are nowhere to be found in the immigration process.
If the major cities in Northern Ontario set up an immigration
department in Toronto, learning about immigrants’ needs and desires
and promoting moving to Northern Ontario, we would be successful.
Canada will only grow with a robust immigration policy. Ditto,
Northern Ontario. If we don’t deal ourselves in, we will have dealt
ourselves out. No one else is going to do it for us.
Speaking of no one else doing it for us, the City
of Toronto has done us a big favour. They have been honest, if a
little loutish. Their threat to leave the AMO (Association of
Municipalities of Ontario) is dramatic. Their view is that Toronto
is a very different kettle of fish than the rest of us and they
want AMO to have nothing to do with defining their reality. I agree
with them. They are larger than most provinces. They should
negotiate their own deal with the province. They are different. I
wouldn’t let AMO speak for me either if I was the biggest kid on
the block.
I’m glad Toronto has done what they have. It
should be lesson for us. Will we have the courage to tell the
province we are not interested in anyone else telling us what is
good for Northern Ontario? We have shared values, experiences and
opportunities. Do we have a shared will?
The mayors of Northern Ontario want to meet with
representatives of the Golden Horseshoe and help them with their
projected growth problems by directing growth to the north. It
won’t work. If you want wealth, you have to steal it. You have to
go pick it off one opportunity at a time. There is no point talking
to Toronto about directing growth north. No one will listen. Just
do it.
Michael Atkins is the president of Laurentian
Media. This column is reprinted from the October issue of Northern
Ontario Business. He can be reached by e-mail at[email protected]
