.The 1B investment initiates company expenditures on operating costs, R&D and investments, corporate taxes, salaries and shareholder dividends. That's all money flowing back into the economy, in addition to 250M every year. Meanwhile, if you leave the resources in the ground, none of that happens.
The flowing of money for its own sake should not be the goal. Not in Northern Ontario, not in Southern Ontario either. The object is sensible investments that provide employment doing something useful.
If the economic sense is there to extract the resource on a market-basis, while respecting the environment, then great! If not, moving on.
I'm not in favour of punishing the North, but investments should be good dollars after long term returns.
Resource extraction is always time-limited, and often surprisingly short.
You build all that infrastructure and then the mine shuts down after 30 years, and you have to pay to take it all back out and remediate.
That cost isn't even shown.
The infrastructure will have no other use. There are no towns en route for it to serve.
Alternate strategies should be considered alongside this type of investment.
Would the north be better off if we made T-Bay a city of 500,000 with a dramatically bigger post-secondary sector, more hub-services as a mid-sized city, able to better attract immigrants and retain
locals?
What about doing the same for Sudbury?
But maybe that means some smaller resource towns will have to be 'ghosted'.
So we buy out the homeowners and businesses; rip out the no longer required infrastructure, don't subsidize the elementary school with 19 kids in it, some of whom are bussed 90 minutes to school.
Alternatively, others may wish to leave the north for other regions.
The north does need investment, the question is what kind, for what return?
And why does southern Ontario get government-funded railways, roads and infrastructure necessary for its business success?You're going to have to look that up like anyone else does.
Perhaps we could answer this with some math.
Suppose we compare the 'investment' in the Ring of Fire vs the recent transit announcements for Toronto.
Ring of Fire:
1 Billion
Population served: up to 20,000 (not directly either)
Cost per person: $50,000
Toronto Transit Announcement: 9 Billion
Population served 3,000,000 plus suburbs.
Cost per person $3,300
Most charitable cost comparison possible makes the Ring of Fire investment 16 times more expensive per person.
Let's then consider potential return.
Ring of Fire, Leveraged private dollars: 3.3 Billion (no secondary investment likely)
GTA transit investment: Conservatively induces growth of 500,000 in population with a commensurate GDP pay off of 56k per year per person, so $28 Billion PER YEAR.
If you'd prefer to compare only induced construction investment, 180,000 housing units @150,000 per unit build cost = 27 Billion
Anyway you cut it, the investment yield is much higher in the south in terms of economic return.
Which again, is not an argument not to invest in the north; its an argument to invest more intelligently in the north.
