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Awards galas and fighting the North’s inferiority complex

For 30 years, the Northern Ontario Business Awards have honoured the best northern businesses while trying to show the North how great it really is
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It’s the 30th anniversary of the Northern Ontario Business Awards tonight.

My wife and I will be there with 498 other people — mostly business owners and their associates — from across Northern Ontario.

These events always attract the movers and the shakers from the North’s major cities. However, part of the charm of the NOBAs is that it brings together business leaders and entrepreneurs from Northern Ontario communities big and small.

It’s an awards gala, sure, but it is, in several ways, much more than that.

NOBA was the first Northern Life event I attended after moving to Greater Sudbury five years ago. I didn’t even own a suit jacket then. Abbas Homayed, our publisher, told me, “Go buy a jacket. You can’t show up without one tonight.”

Fine, I thought, I’ll get a jacket.

I’d only been in the city a few weeks, didn’t know anyone, and my family was still up in Kapuskasing, so I went alone.

I was pretty blown away. The food, the décor, the production — it was a huge event. I thought I came to work for a newspaper and here I was at an awards gala unlike anything I’d seen before. It was like a small-scale version of the Oscars, with plenty of pomp and circumstance.

At my first NOBA, I learned that I needed to broaden my perspective of what Laurentian Media was all about.

Coincidentally, that’s actually one of the goals Michael Atkins, the president of Laurentian Media, had in mind when he came up with the idea for the NOBAs more than 30 years ago — broadening people’s perspectives about what it means to do business in the North.

If you don’t know him, Atkins is a guy who generally tries to see the bigger picture. 

Yes, he wanted to create an event that recognized outstanding and innovative northern business. But Atkins, again with the bigger picture in mind, had another motive for creating the NOBAs. It’s a bit more philosophical.

We complain in the North that Toronto doesn’t pay enough attention to us. There is some truth to this, but that general feeling is also a symptom of our inferiority complex. 

As Canada compares itself to the juggernaut that is the United States, Northern Ontario compares itself to the relative juggernaut of southern Ontario.

Northern communities are isolated from each other geographically. It’s easy to get caught in a silo mentality when you feel so separated from those who are otherwise your peers.

We all know someone who believes life is somehow better, more exciting or more important down south. We lament that our best and brightest young people often leave, taking their talents with them and don’t come back, all the while nurturing the notion that we haven’t “made it” unless we’ve made it outside the North.

Pardon me, but that’s a crock of BS. Atkins saw that crock for what it was more than three decades ago.

In creating the NOBAs, he hoped that by bringing business people from across the North together in one place, to congratulate one another, to share in their successes, to network, it would begin to break down those silos.

I think he hoped it would help undermine that northern inferiority complex and inject a new confidence into the northern identity.

I’ve no doubt new business relationships have been born at every one of those previous 29 NOBA galas. I’ve no doubt several more will be born tonight. These new relationships have meant jobs and money for countless northerners over the decades.

This is economic development done guerilla style with good food and drink (and suit jackets).
 
The NOBAs are our thing, a northern thing. The North is an amazing place. The NOBAs didn’t make it great, but over the past 30 years, it’s one of those institutions that have held up a mirror that’s allowed many of us to see how great we really are.

And that we have nothing to feel inferior about.

Mark Gentili is the managing editor of Sudbury.com and Northern Life.


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Mark Gentili

About the Author: Mark Gentili

Mark Gentili is the editor of Sudbury.com
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