Northern Ontario Secession Movement

How does everyone feel about the possibility of Northern Ontario becoming its own province?

Why would they want to? I see no benifit of spliting Ontario up. Plus Northern Ontario is more sparcly populated then Southern. I guess it would benfit Southern Ontario that we wouldn't have to spend money on building roads and what not up there. But really it would harm northern ontario too much.

If it can sustain itself then I see no problem with it, a new province would be interesting. Just out of curiosity what would the approx population of this new province be?

Take into mind vast provinces such as Manitoba and Sask both only have populations of around 1 million people.

Keep the name and call yourselves the province of "North Ontario".....and the southern state will have to decide on whether to rename the province "Southern Ontario".

But whatever you do, please don't join Manitoba!

But whats the reasoning behind breaking up Ontario?

A foul Liberal trick to get more Senators, MP's and other assorted porkers.

I doubt anyone in Toronto gives a yaks crap about northern Ontario.....unless of couse they own a cabin up there (or cottages or w/e you tree huggers call em)

I live in Northern Ontario and there are more NDP mps then liberal that is for sure and as far as us becomming our own province we could not sustain ourselves just maintaining our vast road ways would bankrupt the new province or our taxes would go through the roof as if our taxes are not bad enough already. It is fun to talk about though.

I feel pretty good about it...how about you? :P

I'm all for it if it means that Northern Ontario will reduce clearcutting of its forests.

Northern Ontario has been exploited for too long and is losing biodiversity fast.

World demand keeps rising as a direct effect of population growth and consumption growth which are what fuels what people think is good: economic growth.

We must stop exporting Canada's forests to other countries. It just encourages them to manage their own resources unsustainably. We must also stop growing Canada's population. We are doing this deliberately for economic growth by allowing immigrants to come from ecologically impoverished areas of dense population to our relatively biodiverse rich land of relatively sparse population.

Recently I heard the White River north of Sault Ste. Marie will be having 3 megahydro dams constructed on it. This is one of the last untamed large canoe route paradise rivers of this lattitude.

Again, I think if Northern Ontario would treat itself as a sustainable community with a deep respect for nature (stop exporting its resources) then it should become a separate province.

Most ppl in the Golden Horseshoe feel that they would greatly benefit if they left ontario and a lot of northern ontarians feel disenfranchised with the government in Tarana I have been in full favour of the golden horseshoe leaving the rest of Ontario.

Northern Ontario produces about $ 7.2 billion on mineral resouces annully. They are then shipped out of Northern Ontario 100%.

To make matters worst our youth then have to leave because they can not find a job. 200,000 have gone to work some where else (particularly southern ontario) and another 100,000 will be leaving in the next 25 years.

The provincial government refuses to step in and address this issue. They would prefer the de-populization of the northern part of it's province. Whatever it can do to benefit Toronto.

Our group is comprised of mainly university and college students who care strongly about Northern Ontario, born and raised. We are tired of seeing all of our aquaintances take off because they can't afford to stay in the north. We figure if the government will not help us, then we will help ourselves. So basically, that's what we're fighting to do. With a premier in Ottawa our voices may finally be heard, and not overshadowed by those needs in Toronto.

Good luck with that.


I'm from Northern Ontario, and my father left because there was no work outside of the mines and Fords offered him a job down here.....it happens.

I'm sorry were not going to let you create a welfare province out of Northern Ontario...we already have Manitoba and the other welfare provinces to deal with, we don't need another.

I support Northern Ontario by vacationing there almost every year…if you guys leave (which you won’t) I’ll never go there again.

845,074 in 2006

northernontariomovement: do you care about the ecological integrity of Northern Ontario also?

Sorry if I have misjudged, but so far you have only eluded to the idea that you want more money and jobs for Northern Ontarians.

I believe it is wrong to continue to ship natural resources (minerals and timber) from wild places in Northern Ontario to insatiable global markets.

There needs to be a system in place whereby, a certain percentage of minerals and resources coming out of northern ontario, would have to be manufactured or processed in northern ontario as well. Instead of shipping the raw resources out of the north to be processed elsewhere.

Think the province would ever go for something like that? Not a chance, that wouldn't benefit our southern friends at all.

I think that processing resources like sawing lumber, canning fish, smelting nickel or producing paper in Northern Ontario would have disadvantages that you haven't thought of.

It would degrade the natural environment. When will Northern Ontarians realize that their wealth is in the beauty of their environment?

If they became subsistence hunters, fishers or farmers instead of catering to globalization, big business and world markets, they could better preserve their environment, and have a stable sustainable population that doesn't increase or decrease.

If it is profitable, why don't you guys start the factories up and produce the products?

Northern Ontaro has beautiful environments and such, but when you are talking about jobs and livelihood my friend the environment will always be pushed to the side.

If the population density is so small in northern ONtario. It would probably be easier/cheaper to make it a Territory rather than a province.

Didn't it used to be? Wasn't the land given to Ontario, and like wise to other provinces?

Yeah, make it a territory as well as Northern Manitoba and Northern and Central Quebec, because they were only granted to those provinces by the Hudson's Bay agreement and other agreements.

For those interested...

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Are you serious? Do you know what life was like for hunter-gatherers and subsidence farmers? Talk about going backwards...

It's only good if you want to live without modern convieniences...since you're only farming enough for your family to eat, there will be no one to pay for electricity, heat, and other beneficial amenities. Actually some people would like to live like that, but not many, especially those with kids.

interesting.

i have heard of northwestern ontario merging with manitoba but not full out northern ontario separation. I have also heard of Toronto separation (they are sick of supporting the leeches that make up the rest of southern ontario).

There is just no winning in today's mentality of "what's mine is mine".

If separation were seriously brought forward, we could expect (possibly) to see similar movements occur in all the non-maritime provinces. Perhaps Canada would become more stable if there were more smaller provinces with governments that more directly reflected their population's needs. How small is necessary to accomplish such a feat though when the predominant attitude is one of "me, me, me".

About the same as everyone feels about Newfoundland trying to pretend to be a province. Oh wait, it already does pretend to be a province. About the same way but larger; like the size of France with less than a million people in it trying to pretend to be something that can sustain itself with no law enforcement, just for starters.

If South Ontario doesn't pay for the Ontario Provincial Police (OPPS; like COPS but missing the C) it has no law enforcement unless the confederates can buy them out and turn them into RCMP. And the only way they could do that is by billing South Ontario for it; then instead of the "Ontario" feds sending more of our revenues per capita to the norths, the confederates would have to do it and it would be right out in the open with "equalization" welfare handouts, so they can go to it.

For those who want to see the confederates, the insults to the words (political) "systems" and "structures" in this mess, gone sooner than later the lines are drawn, war is in the air: Urban against rural, R&D/innovation/services-based (knowledge) economies holding every card in the deck against resource-based economies exporting raw/semi-processed commodities (and of course the value-added job/expanded markets/economies/revenue bases that go along with that mentality).

From the 1996 and 2001 Censuses:

Population and percentage of population by jurisdiction/regions, 1996 and 2001 Censuses
Sources: -- (all) - many pages: -- is probably the best overall ... typical StatsCan't mess. But useful once you get past their insane interfaces without going insane.
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Windsor-Québec City Corridor, 2001

Ontario Section
10,706,513 93% of Ontario's population

Québec Section
6,327,354 87% of Quebec's population

Total Population
17,033,867 57% of Canada's population

Source: Statistics Canada 2001 Census

11,410,046 - 10,706,513 (and dropping in the north Ontarios and moreso in the north Quebecs; other than around the Aboriginal peoples) = 703,533 in the north Ontarios in 2001.

The 656,473 in population growth in "Ontario" (the Ontarios) from the 1996 Census to the 2001 Census is mostly immigration and mostly to the Toronto area, not to the farms and mines and forests and wilderness and tundra of the north Ontarios -- which should not be part of the south and vice versa.

We have absolutely nothing in common on any economic<->socio-economic level between north and south Ontario and economics<->socio-economics (demographics like occupation, average household income for starters) tend to lead directly to political priorities; legislation and namely taxation and spending priorities legislation (budgets and tax laws).

They have truly legitimate gripes to try to open constitutional murmurs (but can get in line), the opening of Pandora's box for Meech Lake round II in the north Ontarios and probably on Mars too. And it's where they can all move to, already are, if they expect anyone on this planet to take them seriously.

Structural reform, systemic reform, scrapping the whole mess of the Canadas and doing a rewrite; fine. But the north Ontarios aren't going to cause it nor is anything but the South Ontarios and southwest Quebecs. Nothing else is capable of anything but the usual bitching and moaning that no one pays any attention to, because there is no reason to. Nothing else even has land claims that aren't granted by the confederates. It's a ridiculous joke, but it's not funny.

Everything needs the confederates out of their faces and the "Ontario" feds, trying to pretend that there's some singularity here, are completely out of their minds; let alone the confederate feds.

What's the point in having a beautiful environment if no one can afford to stay and enjoy it as we do now? We now it's gorgeous where we are and we certainly don't take it for granted. But hardly anyone can afford to stay here. And there is no help in regards to such.

So go to it. What's stopping you/them? Get the private investment lined up to pay more and lose profits for no apparent reason and figure out what the industrial era is and when it started and ended.

There are no markets in the north and all the U.S. and Windsor-Quebec City corridor need are rail lines to get the raw materials to the real markets and industrial bases in the south, with access to our own markets and the other richest markets in the U.S. within a day's trucking from Toronto (no border crossings) let alone the rest where the border crossings are.

And as someone already stated, aside from the impossibilities of getting manufacturing in the middle of nowhere (why not build a Trump Tower or Ritz in the middle of hundreds of miles of wilderness?), why not focus on the lack of pollution in the very near north, the real assets it has for, oh, tourism and such as opposed to laying waste to the norths for no reason whatsoever?

And if anyone thinks otherwise then get your business plans together and see how many private investors think that it's a good idea to pay more/lose profits in added insurance and distribution costs to ship from Nowheres, instead of using the existing (and expanding) infrastructure in the souths that already exist?

Go to it, it's not up to any government it's up to "y'all" to put your entrepeneurs hats on and git yer business plans together to get financing from private investors, financial analysts/location experts who look at nothing but economic regions and globally and we have more than enough to deal with in the south (including the economic regions of the U.S. that matter) around China and India alone.

Go to it and best of luck. Tourism is what you should be focused on as a supplement to your resource-based economies and that's also up to you: get the business plans together, demonstrate your markets, attract the human capital and private investment needed to promote things that people in other countries can only dream of, and do dream of -- heading to "Canada" where there is still real wilderness.

Study them to learn how to market to them and if it works out, it may be worth it to build some real highways up to the wilderness, some real airports, but that kinda takes away from the whole experience of being flown in by bush pilots, to the middle of nowhere, where fishing, hunting, DO NOT GET LOST or you will never be found, away from the main strenths of the north.

But it sucks that you're stuck with the "Ontario" feds. It sucks even more for the south. There is no reason at all for northwest Ontario, with its own hydro-electric power to be paying the same rates per KW/h as those in Toronto have to pay.

And there is no problem backing the north up on that, when you're not even connected to our grids.

But send the complaints to the McGuinty Morons, not us. They screw us over far more than they screw the north over.