Mining the Northwest: Can Thunder Bay be a mining supply mecca?
With six operating mines, and more in the pipeline, the northwest city looks to leverage more opportunity for local supply and service companies and fill some gaps.
Thunder Bay is involved in a very robust industry without any prominent evidence on its existence on the city’s landscape.
Unlike Sudbury or Timmins, where headframes and processing plants dot the horizon, the northwestern Ontario city has become a bedroom community and a growing service hub that feed the six operating mines in the region and the dozens of exploration projects digging into gold, palladium, lithium, graphite, nickel, copper and platinum group elements.
“That’s sometime our Achilles’ heel when you try to illustrate to local people these points of the mining industry,” said John Mason, the mining services project manager for the Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission (CEDC), “and some people just don’t get it.
