As Canada pivots from the US, a city reclaims its past

Once an economic hinge connecting a young Canada from east to west, Thunder Bay is again finding itself at the center of a national effort to strengthen the country’s economic independence.As head of the local Chamber of Commerce, Charla Robinson attends her share of ribbon cuttings and mundane company announcements in Thunder Bay, a Canadian city of more than 100,000 on the western shore of Lake Superior.

But at one such event in September, she cried.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had come to the Alstom manufacturing plant on the edge of town to announce a new deal: Thunder Bay would be part of a national project to build a new fleet of Canadian passenger railcars.

For more than 20 years, Ms. Robinson had been pushing, in one form or another, for a Canadian-built rail project at the sprawling plant, one that manufactured Hawker Hurricane fighter planes during World War II. Now, thanks in part to a rupture between Canada and the United States, she will finally see it happen. “The surprise was we’re building it in Canada, all the way through. That was like, holy smokes. We’re finally doing it,” she says. “Properly.”

There is something fitting about that happening here. For centuries, the northwestern head of Lake Superior held a strategic position as a gateway to the country’s northern interior; with the arrival of Europeans, it became a significant hub of the fur trade.

But in the years leading up to Canada’s creation in 1867, concerns over an expansionist U.S. and uncertain access to its markets helped push the British colonies toward union. The new dominion, still within the British Empire, eventually set out to become a transcontinental nation, building an east-west economy, in part, to resist the powerful pull of the U.S. The city now known as Thunder Bay, where the railway meets the Great Lakes, became a hinge point in that economy.

Over time, economic gravity shifted southward anyway. But now, amid a fracture with its biggest trading partner, Canada is trying to reverse some of that pull – building up its manufacturing base, drawing on its natural resources, and strengthening alliances east and west.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A handwritten sign at Rose N Crantz Roasting Co. in Thunder Bay has renamed its “Americano” offering the “Canadiano.”

In that sense, the forces that helped build Thunder Bay could today help Canada forge a more independent future once again.