One-industry community’s fate familiar

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This article was published 24/08/2010 (5893 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHEN you’re a single-industry town banking on a natural resource, the risk is always there that you are just one economic downturn away from becoming a ghost of your former self.

Rob Warren said the loss of the pulp and paper mill in Pine Falls — the community’s main employer — is just the latest example in the making.

Warren, executive director of the Stu Clark Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Manitoba, said history is littered with examples of villages, towns and cities that disappeared entirely or shrank dramatically once their main industries left or were shut down.

“We’ve seen it going back for hundreds of years,” said Warren.

He cited the gold and silver boom towns during the various rushes in the 1800s, and in the Prairies the towns left empty when grain elevators were closed down.

“It’s too bad about Pine Falls, but it’s because of the resource-extraction base,” he said.

“Anytime you have that with one industry, it just doesn’t bode well for the long term.”

Warren said Elliot Lake in Ontario has remade itself as a retirement community, after the closing of uranium mines, while Grand Forks in North Dakota has transformed itself into a regional sports and entertainment centre after the nearby military air base was cut from 25,000 to 5,000 personnel. But those are rare examples of positive outcomes.

Here in Manitoba examples of hope amid the gloom include Snow Lake, whose population dropped dramatically when the New Britannia Mine closed about five years ago. Last year, HudBay Minerals announced it was spending $85 million to begin building a new gold/zine mine in the area.

But Sherridon, Lynn Lake and Leaf Rapids are all mining communities in Manitoba that lost many of their residents when the mines shut down.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca