August 22, 2016 - It’s around that time of year when students looking ahead to post-secondary studies will face the deadline to accept offers of admission. For Northern Ontario students, this looming date is a symbol of choice: to move away or stay in the north?
August 15, 2016 - Aligning the supply and the demand of the labour market is indispensable to overall economic efficiency. With trends such as a declining population, youth out-migration and a growing skills gap in Northern Ontario, there is an increased need to ensure that the job supply meets demand and that young adults have the education and skills to fill these vacancies.
August 10, 2016 - For nearly 60 years, the Ye Olde Chip Truck has been a well-known institution in the City of Kenora. The clientele is diverse, and includes the likes of local hockey hero Mike Richards to former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. Each summer, thousands brave the lines for a batch of their world famous fries. While Ye Olde has had a number of different of owners over the course of its 59 years, its recipe and popularity have stood the test of time.
August 8, 2016 - There’s an old adage that states, “Don’t have a cow, man” or wait, that’s not the one I’m thinking of. Rather, I mean to repeat Mark Twain’s refrain, “Buy land, they’re not making any more of it.” While neither of these concepts are related in principle, inverting the ethos of Bart Simpson’s famous catchphrase and combining it with Twain’s words of wisdom may present a synergistic opportunity for Northern Ontario.
July 25, 2016 - Practising as a family physician in a rural area can be challenging. For example, rural areas have fewer physicians, but more patients with complex needs and greater distances from advanced health care services. All of this means that doctors often need to wear many hats and have complex workloads while dealing with a lack of resources and professional isolation. In Ontario, there have been many initiatives by governments and communities to attract physicians to rural northern regions including offering financial incentives, marketing the rural and northern “lifestyle” to physicians and enhancing supports for medical practice to reduce stress. However, these attempts have been largely unsuccessful, resulting in high turnover rates of doctors who return to the urban south once the financial incentives have run out or when the northern lifestyle has lost its appeal.
July 18, 2016 - Northern Policy Institute recently released a briefing note about how data is (or isn’t) being collected in Northern Ontario, and how this can impact our knowledge and perception of important public policy issues in the region. The first part of the report focused on the perils of the 2011 National Household Survey (NHS), and the second part zeroed in on a new idea: creating a set of regional economic accounts for Northern Ontario.
July 5, 2016 - The marathon Ontario coroner’s inquest into the deaths of seven First Nations youth in Thunder Bay has finally and mercifully come to an end. We will be spared, for now, from gruesome stories of bodies found in the river.
June 13, 2016 - The first in a series of papers Northern Policy Institute has commissioned in partnership with all six northern workforce planning boards outlines some serious challenges in the Timiskaming District. The authors conclude that, to borrow a phrase, absent significant improvements in rural education outcomes, the region is facing “a future of people without jobs and jobs without people”.
June 6, 2016 - If you have ever studied economics, you will know that one of its calling cries is that people respond to incentives. Indeed you can even consider economics to be the study of how and why people respond to incentives.
May 9, 2016 - You can’t make a living in the North, right? That is what we northerners are often told. The real money is down south or out west. Well, not so fast.
