Economy of Greater Sudbury
[1] In recent decades, however, the city has diversified to establish itself as an emerging centre in a variety of industries, including finance, business, tourism, health care, education, government, film and television production, and science and technology research.
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.
[4] 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.
[8] The city experienced its first-ever labour strike in 1896, when workers building its new waterworks system struck for higher wages.
[1] 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.
[1] 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.
[1] 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.
[10] 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.
The strike, which lasted for nine months, badly damaged Sudbury's economy; it was soon compounded by the recession of 1981-82, during which the city attained the dubious distinction of having the highest unemployment rate in all of North America.
[16] During the post-recession era, Inco's increasing reliance on early retirement packages, rather than layoffs, for reducing its local workforce also significantly cushioned the impact of the staffing reductions on the city's economy.
[20] The city's economic growth has been hindered at times by taxation issues: because of federal corporate taxation rules pertaining to natural resources companies, Sudbury's ability to directly levy municipal taxes on Vale and Xstrata is severely curtailed, compared to most cities whose major employers operate in other industries.
[1] For much of its history, this fact left the city without a sufficient tax base to adequately maintain or improve municipal services.
[1] For example, the city did not maintain a public transit system until 1972, instead relying on a succession of private operators, which were eventually consolidated under the ownership of Paul Desmarais, to provide bus services to commuters.
[1] The city only took over the system after a public outcry following an incident in which several students en route to classes at Laurentian University were hospitalized for carbon monoxide inhalation when their bus stalled and exhaust leaked into the vehicle.
More recently, institutions such as the Franklin Carmichael Gallery and the Northern Ontario School of Architecture have chosen to locate downtown, in part to help spur new retail development due to increased tourist and pedestrian activity.
It will be the world's deepest underground lab facility; the deeper Kolar Gold Fields experiments ended with the closing of the mine in 1992,[29] and the planned DUSEL laboratory is not expected to begin construction before 2012.
