North Bay is not where I'm from. It's what I'm from.
A personal essay on formation, obligation, and what Northern Ontario still means, and still asks for.
I am from North Bay. That sentence does not require explanation or qualification. It is a statement of origin, and it is also a statement of formation. The values, the character, the ambition, and the particular quality of attention I bring to everything I have done since leaving come from that place, from that time, from those people. We are here because of where we have come from. North Bay is where I came from, and it is still in me, still in my focus, still present in the work I do today. That endurance is what this essay is about.
The city sits at the northeastern end of Lake Nipissing, two hundred kilometres north of Toronto on the Canadian Shield. It was built at the confluence of the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National railways, which made it a junction point for goods and people moving across the country during the decades when the railways were the arteries of Canadian commerce. That geography gave it its character: a working city, a junction city, a place where people arrived and stayed, where trades were learned and businesses were built and families were raised on not very much and were proud of it.
My father, Henri Desjardins, was born of that city and that formation. He drove dump trucks underground in Niagara Falls for the Hydro when he was young, came home, taught himself electricity, passed his hydro courses at ninety-eight percent, and built a plumbing, heating and air conditioning business from nothing. He won the contract for all the Cascade 40 water tanks in the city. He built our house with help. He was thirty-eight when a dragon heater in an unventilated building killed him with carbon monoxide before detectors existed to warn against it. And before labour laws prevented their careless use. My mother Fran went back to teaching to keep us, made six thousand dollars her first year, and raised two boys on that and on her own considerable strength. That is the North Bay formation in its most direct expression: people who worked with their hands and their minds and their will and asked nothing of the world except a fair chance, and built something from it, and sometimes had it taken away, and kept going.
The Depression shaped North Bay permanently and in ways that are still visible. The city was the confluence of the two great railways, and during the Depression men were riding the rails in enormous numbers: displaced, hungry, looking for work that had disappeared. They came through North Bay because the rails brought them there, and the city received them. It provided sustenance and welfare when sustenance and welfare were not easy to provide. That generosity, or perhaps that obligation, became structural. North Bay built the apparatus of care: the North Bay Psychiatric Hospital, which ran for generations before closing; the women's crisis infrastructure; the supports for the mentally ill, for the disabled, for citizens of low intellectual capacity, for seniors, for people in long-term care. The full gamut. A city that had seen the bottom of hard times built the structures to catch people who fell there.
That is honourable. It is also exhausting. Citizens have caring fatigue. The population of North Bay has not grown meaningfully in decades, but the proportion of people who require care has grown. The Depression-era generosity has become a permanent civic burden, and the middle and upper third of the population is simultaneously fed up and compassionate, which is an uncomfortable position to occupy for a long time. It produces a city that is genuinely kind and genuinely tired at the same time.
The social structure of North Bay is not unlike small city and small town Canada across the country. Roughly a third of the population are positive and contributing citizens: people who build things, run things, serve on boards, coach hockey, volunteer, employ others, maintain the civic fabric. Another third simply live there, neither contributing significantly nor drawing heavily, the ordinary mass of a community going about its life. And then there is a bottom third: the drug addicted, the petty criminal, the non-contributing, the people who take from the community without giving back. Thieves, addicts, the un-incarcerated low-level criminals who make certain streets unsafe and certain lives harder. This is not a judgment particular to North Bay. It is an honest description of how Canadian society distributes itself in smaller communities, and probably in larger ones too if the geography were compact enough to make it visible.
What is particular to North Bay, and perhaps particular to smaller Canadian cities generally, is the culture I would describe as cheerleading for failure. There is a tall poppy instinct that runs through the community: a suspicion of ambition, a discomfort with success, a tendency to pull down rather than lift up those who try to build something beyond the ordinary. It is a real phenomenon and it costs the city real opportunities. I have ambitions for North Bay that I doubt the city is capable of accepting or achieving, not because the people lack the capacity but because the culture has learned to distrust the ambition required. The underground facility, the ONTel legacy, the ICT sector development arguments I made during Victor Fedeli's Vision 2020 campaign: all of these were genuine opportunities that required the city to believe in itself in a way that the cheerleading-for-failure culture makes difficult.
The melancholy in this essay, and there is some, is precisely there: not in the hardship of the formation years, which produced character and dignity and my father and my mother and everything they built and passed on, but in the gap between what the city could be and what it settles for. North Bay has the geography, the assets, the infrastructure, and the human quality to be more than it is. The underground facility at CFB North Bay alone represents a national-scale strategic asset that the city sits on without fully understanding what it possesses. That gap between the asset and the recognition of it is the North Bay story in miniature.
And yet North Bay remains. The Marketer's Visual Toolkit was a North Bay artifact: acquired there during the ONTel years, at the moment the cage opened and the Toronto career became imaginable. The Is There Anybody Out There? email blast was sent from North Bay. Victor Fedeli, who is now Ontario's Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade, is a North Bay man, and our thirty-year relationship is rooted in that shared origin. The OCI board work has a Northern Ontario dimension. The underground facility conversation, which Fedeli is now carrying to Canada's Ministers of National Defence and Artificial Intelligence, began with a phone call I made to North Bay in 2000 because I thought someone there would know something worth knowing. They did.
North Bay is not nostalgia. Nostalgia is the softening of the past into something easier than it was. What I carry from North Bay is not softened. It is the actual formation: the railway junction, the depression-era generosity, the people who built things with their hands and their will, my father crossing a lake in a skiff to see his newborn son and going back to work the next day, my mother going back to teaching and making six thousand dollars and keeping us. The ski hill where young men packed the snow by sidestepping up it before there was a lift, because they wanted to ski and that was what you did if you wanted to ski. That is North Bay. That is what I carry.
Mike Myers grew up in Scarborough and carries a Canadian identity with the same seriousness, the same specificity, and the same refusal to sentimentalize. His is suburban Toronto. Mine is Northern Ontario. The formation is different in its particulars and recognizable in its character. Both are places that made Canadians who knew exactly what they were.
I honour North Bay for what it gave me. I respect the people who stay and sustain it, the top third who carry the community on their backs with patience and without much reward, and the middle third who simply live there and are decent about it. I am sorrowful about the gap between what the city could be and what it accepts. And I am present: in the work, in the relationships, in the conversations that keep pulling me back to the same place and the same question of what North Bay could still become. That presence is not obligation. It is identity. North Bay is not something I came from. It is something I am.