‘We’re ideally located’
CAN THE TWIN CITIES OF SAULT STE. MARIE WIN OVER AMAZON FOR HQ2?
Matthew Shoemaker is a forward thinker. Today is not the most pressing challenge, necessarily, in his view. It is tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after that, that urban visionaries should be preparing for. In Shoemaker’s vision — informed by a video he saw on Popular Science magazine’s website — the West Coast will be eaten by wildfires, the Prairies strangled by drought and the East Coast sunk by hurricanes by the year 2100.
It is a climate change disaster scenario that, in theory, will make Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., — and its American twin/neighbour, Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., — the two safest climates in all of North America.
And, therefore, the most logical place for Amazon’s new second headquarters.
“We are ideally located,” says Shoemaker, a 28-yearold city councillor. “Sure, we get a bit of snow, now and again, but you just push it around and things move seamlessly.”
Cities across North America have been lusting after Amazon’s HQ2 for weeks now, submitting proposals to the company’s main headquarters in Seattle, Wash. The e-commerce giant is promising to inject $5 billion and 50,000 wellpaying jobs into whatever city ultimately gets chosen. The deadline for bids was Thursday; the winner will be announced in 2018. Halifax, Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Windsor-Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and dozens of other medium, large and extremely large cities have joined the fray, a stew of competing bids that now includes a joint proposal from the comparatively tiny Canadian Sault Ste. Marie (population 73,000) — and its even tinier American twin (population 13,000).
“We don’t mind being the underdogs,” Shoemaker says, from the Canadian side of the border. “If people underestimate us and we end up with Amazon HQ2, we would have pulled off one of the greatest economic achievements in modern history.”
Shoemaker isn’t delusional, and he is not kidding around. In fact, the more he talks about the twin Saults bid, the more sense it makes. Amazon’s request for proposals was essentially open-ended. The company expressed some core preferences for its new home — such as being close to an urban centre with a million residents — but there were no rules that, straight off, would disqualify the Saults.
What they have to offer is location: the twin cities border the St. Mary’s River, connecting Lake Superior to Lake Huron. There is easy access to major highways (the Trans-Canada and Michigan Interstate) without the major headaches of traffic. There are two municipal airports 10 minutes away, instead of 45 minutes, depending on rush hour. There are rail lines, and wind, solar and hydroelectric energy sources. And there is an international border crossing that isn’t perpetually backed up. Most of all, there is the Holy Grail big city slickers profess to chase but often fail to catch: a good quality of life.
“You can buy a home and a cottage on Lake Superior for a quarter of the price of a home in Toronto,” Shoemaker says.
That home will have three bedrooms, a driveway and a garage, while the cottage will be 30 minutes from your front door and overlook a Great Lake. Sault Ste. Marie has its own ski hill. People leave work to go kayaking in the summer and snowmobiling in the winter. Hunters can hunt, in hunting season, and creative types can gaze out at vistas once painted by the Group of Seven.
It is a northern paradise, indeed, and some in town wish to keep it that way without marrying themselves to the fortunes of a multibillion-dollar American company. Jim Shaw owns Shaw Milling Ltd. His grandfather, James, founded the business in 1902. The company started as a feed operation, selling to farms. Over the decades, as farming ebbed away, Shaw Milling diversified, and now sells everything from grass seed to dog food.
“People come here for our customer service,” Shaw says. “Most of the employees have been here for 25 years.”
The Shaw family business was built on knowing the names and wants of it customers. Amazon was built on selling its customers stuff cheaply, knowing their address and shipping it to them in a box.
“Bigger isn’t necessarily better,” Shaw says. “My personal feeling about ecommerce is that you don’t have the same rapport with the outfits you deal with, because so many employees these days don’t care.”
Shaw is 66, and can’t foretell the future, but then part of Shoemaker’s argument in favour of landing Amazon lies in looking to the city’s past. Sault Ste. Marie was a bumbling backwater with 2,000 residents when an American industrialist named Francis Clergue showed up in 1894 looking to invest. Clergue started a steel mill, a paper mill and a railway, and so began the boom. By 1921, the city had grown to 21,000 people, a number that quadrupled over the next 50 years. In recent years, alas, the population has declined.
It is a worrisome trend for a young city councillor, and so why not dream big, as Clergue once did?
“We’re right in the centre of everything and the quality of life here can’t be beat,” Shoemaker says. “We have got everything Amazon are looking for.”
Everything today, plus, in 2100, the safest climate in North America.