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The Great Lakes' port of THUNDER BAY is
much closer to Winnipeg than to any other city in Ontario, and
its population of 117,000 is prone to see themselves as Westerners.
Economics as well as geography define this self-image, for this
was until recently a booming grain-handling port, and the grain,
of course, is harvested in the Prairies. The grain still arrives
here by rail to be stored in gigantic grain elevators and then
shipped down the St Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic, but not in
the same quantities as before. In the 1990s, the economics of
the grain trade changed in favour of Canada's Pacific ports and
Thunder Bay suffered accordingly. Consequently, many of the grain
elevators that dominate the harbourfront are literally rotting
away, while others are hanging on by the skin of their teeth.
This unwarranted reversal of fortunes has encouraged Thunder Bay
to reinvent itself by encouraging manufacturing and tourism. To
boost the latter, the city council has created a cheerful marina
and built a spanking new casino , though this
proved very controversial. Such was the opposition that the casino
was, in a rather bizarre compromise, called the "Charity
Casino" to remind the citizenry that the profits be spent
on good works.
Thunder Bay was created in 1970 when the two existing
towns of Fort William and Port Arthur were brought together under
one municipal roof. Fort William was the older
of the two, established in 1789 as a fur-trading post and subsequently
becoming the upcountry headquarters of the North West Company.
It lost its pre-eminent position when the North West and Hudson's
Bay companies merged, but it remained a fur-trading post until
the end of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, in the middle of
the nineteenth century, rumours of a huge silver lode brought
prospectors to the Lake Superior shoreline just north of Fort
William and here they established Port Arthur . But the silver
didn't last and the Port Arthur, Duluth and Western
railway (PD&W), which had laid the lines to the mines, was
soon nicknamed "the Poverty, Distress and Welfare".
The Canadian Northern Railway, which took over the abandoned PD&W
lines, did much to rescue the local economy, but did not bring
Fort William and Port Arthur closer together. Rudyard Kipling
noted that "The twin cities hate each other with the pure,
passionate, poisonous hatred that makes cities grow. If Providence
wiped out one of them, the other would pine away and die."
Fortunately, the 1970 amalgamation bypassed Kipling's prediction
and nowadays these parochial rivalries have all but vanished.
Scarred by industrial complexes and crisscrossed
by rail lines, Thunder Bay is not immediately enticing, but it
does have enough of interest to make a pleasant stopover on the
long journey to or from Winnipeg. The most agreeable part of town
is the few blocks stretching inland from behind the marina in
Thunder Bay North - north of Central Avenue - and here
you'll also find several good caf?s and restaurants. Thunder
Bay South is much grittier, but on its outskirts is the
city's star turn, the replica fur-trading post of Old
Fort William.
