North Bay: Northern Gateway

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is also the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the
Peaceable Kingdom, and the co-author of Invisible and Inaudible in
Washington: American Policies Toward Canada.

Michael Barnes and photographer Ed Eng have organized an attractive
chronology and description of North Bay. They clearly love their
subject. Barnes reviews early French-Canadian missionaries and fur
traders along with North Bay’s transportation systems, its businesses
and industries, artists and athletes, churches and schools, criminals
and politicians. There are pictures of buildings now demolished. Barnes
cites famous residents of North Bay: Lord Thomson of Fleet, once a
municipal councillor; Grey Owl, whose false identity the local newspaper
discovered but did not disclose until the great man’s death; the
Dionne Quintuplets; cartoonist Lynn Johnston, creator of “For Better
or For Worse”; and Ontario Premier Mike Harris. Less famous people who
served their city also have a place, as have visitors from Samuel de
Champlain to the Queen.

Unfortunately, historians will find significant errors and omissions.
There are no maps and no index. There is no hint of Regulation XVII
(Ontario’s notorious language law of 1912), nor of the conscription
referendum of 1942. Did North Bay, with its anglophones and
francophones, mirror the national divisions? North Bay was the site of
the Bomarc missiles, a subject of controversy during the 1963 federal
election campaign; did nobody in North Bay have opinions, for or
against? Barnes notes the court-ordered removal from office of perennial
mayor Merle Dickerson, but not his re-election when voters had their
first opportunity. He notes that Liberal MP Jack Garland “died
suddenly at the age of forty-six” without mentioning that Garland
weighed 500 pounds. Former Ontario cabinet minister Charles McCrea
appears as “McRae.”

Barnes frequently mentions Mike Harris. Although Premier Sir William
Hearst (1914–19) came from Sault Ste. Marie, Harris’s claim to be
“the first Premier to represent a Northern Ontario constituency”
stands unchallenged. There is no hint that the policies of the Harris
government are the most controversial of any provincial government for
more than half a century.