Mayoral candidate Bill Crumplin says costly “mega projects” will not prepare Greater Sudbury’s economy for the 21st century.
“I can’t blame Brian Bigger for Northern Ontario’s economic conditions,” Crumplin said in a news release this week.
“But I have to wonder, in light of the evidence of these conditions, whether Greater Sudbury is moving in a direction that makes any sense. At a time when citizens are concerned about rising tax burdens and other costs, it doesn’t make sense that our city is spending public money on expensive new projects that will have limited impacts on growing our economy and creating jobs.”
Saying the Conference Board of Canada predicts flat growth for Sudbury, Crumplin said municipal spending should be focused on attracting millennials and members of the “creative class” to re-locate here.
Instead, the city under Mayor Brian Bigger is focused on what Crumplin says are outdated large construction projects.
“Our future lies in creating wealth-generating jobs that support mining and supply services, and the education and health fields,” he said.
“This isn’t a big secret. In fact, it’s one of the main thrusts of our City’s Economic Development Plan. What will be a challenge for Greater Sudbury, however, is the competition that we find ourselves in to attract businesses and innovators as we focus on costly mega-projects that would be more suitable in the 1970s than in the 2020s.”
Crumplin said he has a better idea.
“It’s time that we got serious about reshaping our communities so that they are desirable and livable for the people that we need to attract to our city to fill 21st century tech jobs,” he said. “These are the jobs filled by what urban theorist Richard Florida describes as the ‘creative class.' Creative-class individuals are those that have recently been trained in how to work with ‘open or big data.'“
That means attracting millennials to Greater Sudbury, he said.
“We need to attract and keep them and their ideas in our community. This is a highly educated, highly mobile cohort, and attracting it to our city means we have to focus on lifestyle and urban design,” Crumplin said. “In the 21st century, it’s not so much about identifying specific jobs as it is about cultivating the appropriate ingredients a city needs in order to keep and attract people with the skill sets that the emerging economy requires.”
Attracing them means being able to host “provincial, national and even international conferences” in a state-of-the-art facility in the downtown core, besides what Sudbury already offers in terms of outdoor recreation opportunities, cultural diversity and inclusion, safe neighbourhoods and communities, arts and culture, health services and post-secondary education, transportation option in and out of the city, and relatively inexpensive housing options.
“In recent weeks, I have sought input from local millennials who possess high-tech skills and I have learned that they have moved here for the lifestyle and/or that they or their partner were born here,” Crumplin said. “They extol the lifestyle benefits of the region and the fact that they can work from home here in Sudbury via the internet. They find it financially and personally beneficial to live here and commute when necessary versus living in or near the 416 or 905 area codes.”
He said putting a stop to moving the arena is key.
“There is still time to reverse course on the costly mistake to move our major community arena out of the downtown,” he said. “A new arena – or a retrofitted facility in the downtown, can act as a catalyst for development – commercial and residential. The goal of getting more people to live and work in all of our downtowns should be the one that scarce public money is spent to achieve. These are vibrant and accessible places that tomorrow’s wealth-generators want to live, work and play in.”
