Northern Ontario’s dream to secede reborn
They called it Aurora. It was to be a new province in Canada, carved out of Ontario’s hinterland, so far northwest of Toronto it is a different place, practically Manitoba.
That was in the 1940s, when Hubert Limerick’s New Province League led the push for northern secession. It was hardly the first time, nor the last. The latest effort has taken the form of a revamped and renamed political party. Their aim is to seize the balance of power in what they hope, after June’s election, will be a narrowly divided legislature at Queen’s Park. They will then seek a referendum on the creation of a new province.
First, they need votes — which is how the National Post came to be sitting in an old trailer outside Callander, Ont., in the woods near Lake Nipissing, in the yard of Trevor Holliday, a 35-yearold former coach driver for Ontario Northland, a father of five, and the leader of the Northern Ontario Party.
“In the North, trailers are more accepted than buses,” Holliday observes good-humouredly, and without implying the party could afford a bus — or indeed, even this trailer, which belongs to Holliday’s uncle.
“We’re not looking to do anything negative. We want the people of Northern Ontario to be able to be heard … if the majority of people want to have our own province, standalone province, then that’s something we have to aim towards,” Holliday says.
The region covered by the NOP — “Kenora to Mattawa, Gravenhurst to James Bay,” as Holliday puts it — has struggled under the high cost of electricity delivery, the closure of rail service, the pressures of migration to the southern population belt, the aging of those who remain, and the perception of lost opportunities in an extraction sector that ships its resources to places like the steel mill cluster in Huntington, W. Va, rather than processing them locally.
In an election against the scandal-laden Liberals, the shambolic Tories and the hapless NDP — all led by politicians from Toronto and Hamilton — Holliday thinks he can seize the balance of power, even if his party wins only a few seats. He will have candidates in 13 Northern Ontario ridings, plus one in the Toronto riding represented by Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne.
Should any win, there will be no party whip. Members would have to vote according to their constituents’ wishes, as expressed by a poll. “That’s radical in politics,” said campaign manager John Wilson.
There are two constituencies that do not seem to be included in the NOP’s vision: First Nations and francophones.
Last year, Ontario created two new ridings in the North, one majority Indigenous, the other majority francophone. The only mention of Indigenous people in the NOP’s platform, however, is to assist their communities in local power generation and a plan to “develop their own Fish and Wildlife game system.”
The party is also opposed to multiple school boards on economic grounds, unlikely to be popular with francophone voters.
Rather, to judge from an impromptu late morning meet-and-greet with candidates and volunteers, this is not a big tent movement. The more romantic aspects of the NOP’s message are pitched at a certain type of culturally nostalgic working-class white anglophone Northern Ontarian, the type whose soul is likely to be stirred by The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Sudbury Saturday Night, or Man! I Feel Like A Woman! As with most independence movements, Northern Ontario secession has an aspect of aggrieved identity politics.
Holliday takes pride in not being, as he puts it, “polished.” Campaign manager Wilson describes the party’s target demographic as regular folk: “bus drivers, farmers, milk delivery guys.”
Things were looking promising for NOP with this constituency when Patrick Brown was alienating the province’s social conservative vote. With new PC leader Doug Ford’s relentless pitch to “folks,” and with his promise to move ahead on the Ring of Fire chromite mining project “if I have to hop on a bulldozer myself,” they may be less so.
That won’t deter the faithful. “This is a hundred-year argument that’s never been settled,” says Ed Deibel, a voluble senior who formed the Northern Heritage Party in 1973, and took the fight to Queen’s Park.
He says he got into politics because of a power-tax plan. “I will go to jail before I pay heat and light tax to the Ontario government,” he recalls thinking.
So he called a meeting at the Golden Dragon restaurant in North Bay, and arrived to find people lined up down the street. Buoyed by their enthusiasm, he drove south and literally pitched a tent at Queen’s Park until he got a meeting with Progressive Conservative Premier Bill Davis.
“He damn near swallowed that cigar and he said, ‘Ed, you get a vote every four years,’ ” Deibel recalled.
That kind of condescension from a supercilious Torontonian power broker is the kind of thing that drives Northern resentment and dreams of secession. But though Deibel pitched serious plans about domestic resource processing, his party was seen as a protest alternative. Holliday actually wants to win the Northern ridings as a stepping stone to secession from Ontario, and professes to think he can.
The dream of a new province is nearly as old as Canada. It dates to the 1870s and James Dawson, a Scottish engineer who surveyed a road from what is now Thunder Bay to what is now Winnipeg, and later represented the riding of Algoma, which was at the time the only Northern riding. The movement was first motivated by optimism for the North, and only later by resentment of the South and a fierce sense of rebellion.
That sentiment usually leads hinterlands to vote for opposition or third parties. Northern Ontario bucks that trend. It has preferred to vote for the winner, which “has most likely been an attempt by voters to make the region useful politically to the party in power, in this way hoping at least to obtain a few handouts,” according to The Government and Politics of Ontario, edited by Graham White.
For example, the North supported the ruling Progressive Conservatives for four decades until the mid1980s. In 1987, when the Liberals won a second election, the North elected seven Liberals, six NDP, and two PCs. In 1990 when the NDP won, the North was with them, with ten NDP ridings out of 15.
This time around, Wilson thinks the NOP can win seats of their own. But even he is skeptical about secession, regardless of whether the people of the region happen to want it.
“No party is going to tackle reopening of the Constitution,” Wilson said. “It’s death for any federal party that even starts to think about it, or mentions it.”
Nonetheless, he is chippy about their prospects.
“So, would we be impoverished up here? I really doubt it. You might find that southern Ontario was a bit impoverished,” he says.