Thank goodness the North has people like these

Northern Ontario, it seems to me, has been blessed with more than its fair share of visionaries.

That's a really, really good thing, because the North is often overlooked. The south draws a good portion of its wealth from our natural resources, our industries are major economic drivers, but Queen's Park thinks it knows best how to govern our affairs, though history shows many times it has no clue.

With too few of us to influence policy for our betterment, northerners are often left to our own devices. Despite the challenges this poses, we take an immense amount of pride in our self-sufficiency. Fortunately, as I mentioned earlier, Northern Ontario has always been able to count on people of incredible talent and vision who have made that near self-sufficiency possible.

One of those people is Ted Szilva, the father of the Big Nickel, who passed away last week at age 81. When Szilva conceived his one-of-a-kind tourist attraction in the early 1960s, the notion that anyone would want to travel to remote Northern Ontario for pleasure was practically foreign.

Szilva refused to think that way. He didn't see what was there; he saw what could be there. He saw Sudbury, and by extension all of the North, as something valuable for more than its natural resources. He saw it as a stranger might see it – a wild and untamed natural playground, with pockets of urbanity each having its own unique quality and flavour.

Szilva was a Sudburian through and through. He loved this city; he loved its people; he was fascinated by the mining industry and saw in his own fascination a common interest of all people: curiousity. He banked on that curiousity and created a destination – first with the Big Nickel, then with Big Nickel Mine, which has since morphed into Dynamic Earth – that could slake that interest.

The Big Nickel was not the first of Northern Ontario's enormous roadside attractions, but it's probably the most famous. It put Sudbury on the map as something other than a moonscape. And we've lived in the shadow of Szilva's vision ever since.

I mentioned earlier that Queen's Park is often clueless when it comes to adopting policy for the North. Not always. Besides attractive Ontario tax credits for film productions, a grant of up to $500,000 for productions that choose to shoot in the North has helped create an entirely new, multi-million-dollar industry here. In other words, the province did something right.

Development agency Music and Film in Motion, the City of Greater Sudbury and production company Meteo+ -- not to mention northern filmmakers themselves who first saw the importance of telling our stories in moving pictures -- laid the important groundwork for a film sector in the region. These early efforts put down a solid foundation of skills and notoriety to build upon.

But what has proved the catalyst is the birth of Northern Ontario Film Studios. A working studio was the missing piece of the puzzle, the seed around which an industry could crystallize. David Anselmo, the head of the studio, is – like Ted Szilva – a man of vision. Like Szilva, he didn't see what was, but what could be.

The talent and the tenacity were always here. Film work was happening before Anselmo and NOFS came along. But it was his vision to use government incentives as a springboard to transform a derelict arena into a hub for film production in the North, creating the infrastructure needed to draw bigger and more expensive projects to the region, supporting hundreds of jobs, a dozen spin-off industries, and injecting tens of millions of dollars into the economy every year.

The importance of NOFS can't be ignored. Greater Sudbury isn't the only community to benefit either -- North Bay, Mattawa and Sault Ste. Marie have benefited, too.

Hollywood (Further) North is now a recognized commodity. Last week's announcement that Anselmo's Hideaway Pictures had struck a deal worth nearly $100 million with Motion Picture Corporation of America solidifies the impact NOFS has had. This is an entirely new industry for Northern Ontario and it's one to be reckoned with.

Szilva and Anselmo are but two examples of the amazing people who have made things happen in the North. There are dozens of stories of people like them, people who see the forest for the trees, people who chart new territory and drag us along with them.

We are the beneficiaries of their vision and we owe a debt of gratitude to each and every one of them.

Mark Gentili is the managing editor of Northern Life.