Porter's arrival marks watershed moment for North

This week, Porter Airlines celebrated the start of its new three-times-daily flights between Timmins and Toronto Island.

At a ceremony in the Timmins Victor M. Power Airport, Porter President Robert Deluce and Timmins Mayor Tom Laughren spoke of what the expansion of service means to both the airline and the Northern Ontario city.

New business and tourism opportunities, a welcome alternative for travellers, a validation of a unique approach to air travel – the launch is all of that.

But it also marks a watershed moment for Northern Ontario.

For too many years, northerners watched in utter despair as their services shrank, offices closed and commercial operations withered. The mining sector struggled and the forest products sector imploded. Young people left town, grocery stores closed, banks shuttered branches and transportation companies cut routes.

Those were very hard times, when many northern towns wondered if they’d get from one end of the year to the other.

And the hard times were made so much more painful by the contrast with an exuberantly wealthy south, which was then motoring along on the coat-tails of an American hyper-boom.

There was much talk, in those dark days, of sunset industries and yesterday’s regions. Academics spoke openly of perhaps shutting down some of Ontario’s struggling northern towns and moving their residents to larger centres where they wouldn’t be such a drain on the public purse. Fingers wagged; lectures were delivered; people pitied their raggedy-arsed northern cousins.

Well, times change, and Ontario’s economic world is…slowly, slowly…beginning to shift from paper to rock, from south to north, from autos to minerals.

It’s been a long time coming.

And if it lasts long enough – China’s gargantuan appetites and global markets willing –Northern Ontario may have a chance, finally, to fashion a strong foundation for a sustainable economy that will carry it along into a rosy future.

In the meantime, let’s hope northerners will be gracious, understanding and un-gloating in their demeanour as they watch their raggedy-arsed southern counterparts try to come to terms with an economy that has been gutted by global forces well beyond their control.