Economy of Greater Sudbury - History

History

In 1856 the provincial land surveyor Albert Salter had located magnetic anomalies in the area that were strongly suggestive of mineral deposits, but his discovery aroused little attention because the area was remote and inaccessible. By the early 1880s, a small lumber camp, named Sainte-Anne-des-Pins ("St. Anne of the Pines") after a Jesuits mission concurrently established in the area, existed near what is now downtown Sudbury.

During construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1883, blasting and excavation revealed high concentrations of nickel-copper ore at Murray Mine on the edge of the Sudbury Basin, bearing out Salter's earlier readings and leading to the establishment of a permanent settlement to serve as a transportation and commercial hub for the mining and lumber camps. The community was named for Sudbury, Suffolk, in England, which was the hometown of Canadian Pacific Railway commissioner James Worthington's wife. The community was incorporated as a town in 1893.

Sudbury's pentlandite, pyrite and pyrrhotite ores contain profitable amounts of many elements—primarily nickel and copper, but also including smaller amounts of cobalt, platinum, gold, silver, selenium and tellurium. The construction of the railway allowed exploitation of these mineral resources as well as large-scale lumber extraction.

Thomas Edison visited the Sudbury area as a prospector in 1901, and is credited with the original discovery of the ore body at Falconbridge.

The city experienced its first-ever labour strike in 1896, when workers building its new waterworks system struck for higher wages. This was one of several early public works crises in the city which contributed to the defeat of mayor Murray Biggar in the 1896 elections.

Mining began to replace lumber as the primary industry as improvements to the area's transportation network, including trams, made it possible for workers to live in one community and work in another. Two major mining companies were created, Inco in 1902 and Falconbridge in 1928. They became two of the city’s major employers and two of the world's leading producers of nickel.

Through the decades that followed, Sudbury's economy went through boom and bust cycles as world demand for nickel fluctuated. Demand was high during the First World War when Sudbury-mined nickel was used extensively in the manufacturing of artillery in Sheffield, England. It bottomed out when the war ended and then rose again in the mid-1920s as peacetime uses for nickel began to develop. The town was reincorporated as a city in 1930. The city recovered from the Great Depression much more quickly than almost any other city in North America due to increased demand for nickel in the 1930s. Sudbury was the fastest-growing city and one of the wealthiest cities in Canada for most of the decade. Many of the city's social problems in the Great Depression era were not caused by unemployment, but due to the difficulty in keeping up with all of its new infrastructure demands created by rapid growth. Between 1936 and 1941, the city was ordered into receivership by the Ontario Municipal Board. Another economic slowdown affected the city in 1937, but the city's fortunes rose again during the Second World War; the Frood Mine alone accounted for 40 percent of all the nickel used in Allied artillery production during the war.

After the end of the war, Sudbury was in a good position to supply nickel to the United States government when it decided to stockpile non-Soviet supplies during the Cold War. By the 1970s, Inco employed a quarter of the local workforce.

On April 21, 1944, the city's mine workers were unionized for the first time with the certification of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Local 598. Inco and Falconbridge each set up their own puppet unions, the United Copper Nickel Workers Union at Inco and the Falconbridge Workers Council at Falconbridge, in an attempt to destabilize the Mine Mill, but the company efforts were largely rejected by workers—the United Copper Nickel Workers, in particular, became better known as "Nickel Rash". Robert Carlin, a prominent Mine Mill organizer, was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in 1943 as the city's first-ever Co-operative Commonwealth Federation representative, although he was later expelled by the party for not sufficiently denouncing the purported—and vastly overstated—prominence of Communists in the union.

In 1956, the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers held their Canadian convention in Sudbury, which was noted for hosting the first concert given by Paul Robeson outside of the United States after the American government instituted its travel ban against him. Also that year, the city approved a natural gas contract with Northern Ontario Natural Gas— the city's mayor at the time, Leo Landreville, was later forced to resign from the Supreme Court of Ontario bench after allegations that he had received stock favours in exchange for the contract.

In the 1950s and 60s, Sudbury was beset by extensive labour unrest, experiencing its first mine workers' strike in 1958. Smaller strikes also took place in 1966 and 1969.

The United Steelworkers had also set their sights on raiding the Mine Mill locals, and there was often violence in the streets as the rival factions confronted each other—notably, a Mine Mill meeting at the Sudbury Arena, discussing whether to join the Steelworkers, erupted into a riot on September 10, 1961. Ultimately, the two unions settled into an uneasy truce, with Mine Mill winning the right to unionize Falconbridge, and the Steelworkers winning the right to unionize Inco. The national Mine Mill organization eventually merged into the Steelworkers in 1967—most of the Mine Mill locals remaining in Sudbury followed, although Local 598 voted against the merger and remained an independent autonomous local until becoming part of the Canadian Auto Workers in 1993.

In 1978, the workers of Sudbury's largest mining corporation, Inco (now Vale), embarked on a strike over production and employment cutbacks. The strike, which lasted for nine months, badly damaged Sudbury's economy and spurred the city government to launch a project to diversify the city's economy. Through an aggressive strategy, the city tried to attract new employers and industries through the 1980s and 1990s. The city's strategies were not always successful; one particularly noted boondoggle saw substantial municipal funding given to a failed angora goat farm.

However, in 2006, Inco and Falconbridge were taken over by foreign multinational corporations: Inco was acquired by the Brazilian company Vale, and Falconbridge was purchased by the Swiss company Xstrata. Vale now employs less than 5 per cent of the workforce. By 2006, 80% of Greater Sudbury's labour force was employed in services with 20% remaining in manufacturing.

On September 19, 2008, a fire destroyed the historic Sudbury Steelworkers Hall on Frood Road.

A strike at Vale's operations, which began on July 13, 2009, and saw a tentative resolution announced on July 5, 2010, lasted longer than the devastating 1978 strike, but had a much more modest effect on the city's economy than the earlier action—the local rate of unemployment declined slightly during the strike.