THUNDER BAY -- A new Northern Policy Institute report is calling for more political control to fall to smaller segments of Northern Ontario.
Provincial economic development planning in the north relies on five economic zones based around the region's four centres in Northeastern Ontario with populations over 40,000 people and only Thunder Bay in the Northwest.
According to the Economic Zones of Northern Ontario report by Brock University Political Science associate professor Charles Conteh, the province should be counting 11 such planning areas.
"Too often, local communities in Northern Ontario have felt as though they are on their own amid the impersonal forces of change, despite the efforts of the provincial and federal governments and their constituent agencies in the region," the report reads.
"This clearly points to the need to rethink and restructure current modes of intervention to make them more inclusive of local communities that are at the front lines of industrial restructuring and economic change."
The report advocates Northwestern Ontario be divided to recognize unique development opportunities along district lines, where Thunder Bay's regional development spreads eastward to Greenstone and Lake Superior's north shore. That area has its own unique challenges, it expresses, which could be planned as an industrial corridor.
Other regional zones include the Rainy River District with Fort Frances as its centre, the decentralized Kenora District, and as many as three economic zones that could be added across the remote north.
"We're missing opportunities so as a result, infrastructure investments are not being targeted at where they would deliver the largest bang for the dollar," said NPI president, Charles Cirtwill.
"Types of infrastructure that are being constructed -- whether it's health care, whether it's education, whether it's post-secondary education or even infrastructure along the lines of cellular towers, high-speed Internet, highways. If we continue to treat the region with too few centres of operation, we end up under-serving ourselves."
Cirtwill said municipalities are spending time and resources competing against each other instead of being able to collaborate on larger, public sector projects with the goal of better managing those resources.
"We have municipal leagues that get together and talk about how we're going to deliver water services. That's not the same thing as having the authority to move the water authority to being a regional service because it makes sense. The farther you go into those kinds of developments, the farther you get away from a regional plan.