Greater Sudbury (), also known as Sudbury, is the most populous city in Northern Ontario with a population around 166,004 in 2021. Greater Sudbury is the only single-tier municipality in Northern Ontario, the largest city in Ontario by area and the fifth largest in Canada. The city is separate from, but entirely surrounded by, the Sudbury District.
The Sudbury region was inhabited by the Ojibwe people of the Algonquin group of the Anishinaabe prior to the founding of Sudbury after the discovery of nickel and copper ore in 1883 during the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Greater Sudbury was formed in 2001 by merging the cities and towns of the former Regional Municipality of Sudbury with several previously unincorporated townships. Being located inland, the local climate is extremely seasonal, with average January lows of around and average July highs of .
The population resides in an urban core and many smaller communities scattered around 330 lakes and among hills of rock blackened by historic smelting activity. Sudbury was once a major lumber centre and a world leader in nickel mining. Mining and related industries dominated the economy for much of the 20th century. The two major mining companies which shaped the history of Sudbury were Inco, now Vale Limited, which employed more than 25% of the population by the 1970s, and Falconbridge, now Glencore. Sudbury has since expanded from its resource-based economy to emerge as the major retail, economic, health, and educational centre for Northeastern Ontario. Sudbury is also home to a large Franco-Ontarian population, which influences its arts and culture.
Toponymy James Worthington, the superintendent of construction on the Northern Ontario segment of the railway, selected the name Sudbury after Sudbury, Suffolk, in England, which was the hometown of his wife Caroline Hitchcock.Thomas, Ray and Pearsall, Kathy (1994). Sudbury. Boston Mills Press. .
The city's official name was changed to Greater Sudbury in 2001, when it was amalgamated with its suburban towns into the current city, on the grounds of ensuring that the merger did not erase the longstanding community identities of the outlying towns.Louise Surette, "Three new megacities proposed: Sudbury to be super city of Northeastern Ontario". North Bay Nugget, November 27, 1999. In everyday usage, however, the city is still more commonly referred to as just Sudbury.
History
The original name for the region was N'Swakamok, which translates to 'where the three roads meet' in the Ojibwe language. The Sudbury region was home to by Ojibwe people, an Anishinaabeg group, as early as 9,000 years ago following the retreat of the last continental ice sheet.
In 1850, local Ojibwe chiefs entered into an agreement with the British Crown to share a large tract of land, including what is now Sudbury, as part of the Robinson Huron Treaty. In exchange the Crown pledged to pay an annuity to First Nations people, which was originally set at $1.60 per treaty member and increased incrementally; its last increase was in 1874, leaving it fixed at $4.
French Jesuits were the first to establish a European settlement when they set up a mission called Sainte-Anne-des-Pins, just before the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1883. The Sainte-Anne-des-Pins church played a prominent role in the development of Franco-Ontarian culture in the region. Coincidentally, Ste-Anne is the patron saint of miners.
During construction of the railway in 1883, blasting and excavation revealed high concentrations of nickel-copper ore at Murray Mine on the edge of the Sudbury Basin. This discovery brought the first waves of European settlers, who arrived not only to work at the mines, but also to build a service station for railway workers. Provincial land surveyor JL Morris laid out the intersection of Elm Street and Durham Street in 1884 as he planned the township.
Rich deposits of nickel sulphide ore were discovered in the Sudbury Basin geological formation. The construction of the railway allowed exploitation of these mineral resources and shipment of the commodities to markets and ports, as well as large-scale lumber extraction. In 1886 the Canadian Copper Company and others besides had been formed with the idea to exploit the region's natural wealth, and by 1888 the Copper Cliff smelter was born.
Sudbury was incorporated as a town in 1893, and its first mayor was Joseph Étienne aka Stephen Fournier.Wallace, C. M.; & Thomson, Ashley (Eds.) (1993). Sudbury: Rail Town to Regional Capital (3rd ed.). Dundurn Press. .
The American inventor Thomas Edison visited the Sudbury area as a prospector in 1901. He is credited with the original discovery of the ore body at Falconbridge.
Mining began to replace lumber as the primary industry as the area's transportation network was improved to include trams. These enabled workers to live in one community and work in another. Sudbury's economy was dominated by the mining industry for much of the 20th century. Two major mining companies were created: Inco in 1902 and Falconbridge in 1928. They became two of the city's major employers and two of the world's leading producers of nickel.
Through the decades that followed, Sudbury's economy went through boom and bust cycles as world demand for nickel fluctuated. Demand was high during the First World War, when Sudbury-mined nickel was used extensively in the manufacturing of artillery in Sheffield, England. It bottomed out when the war ended and then rose again in the mid-1920s as peacetime uses for nickel began to develop. The town was reincorporated as a city in 1930.
The city recovered from the Great Depression much more quickly than almost any other city in North America due to increased demand for nickel in the 1930s. Sudbury was the fastest-growing city and one of the wealthiest cities in Canada for most of the decade. Many of the city's social problems in the Great Depression era were not caused by unemployment or poverty, but due to the difficulty in keeping up with all of the new infrastructure demands created by rapid growth — for example, employed mineworkers sometimes ended up living in boarding houses or makeshift shanty towns, because demand for new housing was rising faster than supply. Between 1936 and 1941, the city was ordered into receivership by the Ontario Municipal Board. Another economic slowdown affected the city in 1937, but the city's fortunes rose again with wartime demands during the Second World War. The Frood Mine alone accounted for 40 percent of all the nickel used in Allied artillery production during the war. After the end of the war, Sudbury was in a good position to supply nickel to the United States government when it decided to stockpile non-Soviet supplies during the Cold War.
The open coke beds used in the early to mid-20th century and logging for fuel resulted in a near-total loss of native vegetation in the area. Consequently, the terrain was made up of exposed rocky outcrops permanently stained charcoal black by the air pollution from the roasting yards. Acid rain added more staining, in a layer that penetrates up to into the once pink-grey granite.
In 1969 a white paper circulated about local Indigenous issues. The N'Swakamok Native Friendship Centre was founded in 1972 to address these concerns and provide support for the local Indigenous community.
The construction of the Inco Superstack in 1972 dispersed sulphuric acid through the air over a much wider area, reducing the acidity of local precipitation. This enabled the municipality, province and Inco and academics from Laurentian University to begin an environmental recovery program in the late 1970s, labelled a "regreening" effort. Lime was spread over the charred soil by hand and by aircraft. Seeds of wild grasses and other vegetation were also spread. As of 2010, 9.2 million new trees have been planted in the city.Annual Report 2010, Page 4, City of Greater Sudbury Land Reclamation Program. Vale has begun to rehabilitate the slag heaps that surrounds their smelter in the Copper Cliff area with the planting of grass and trees, as well as the use of biosolids to stabilize and regreen tailings areas."Biosolids rejuvenate mining wasteland". Northern Ontario Business, July 13, 2018.
In 1978, the workers of Sudbury's largest mining corporation, Inco (now Vale), embarked on a strike over production and employment cutbacks. The strike, which lasted for nine months, badly damaged Sudbury's economy. The city government was spurred to launch a project to diversify the city's economy.
A unique and visionary project, Science North was inaugurated in 1984 with two-snowflake styled buildings connected by a tunnel through the Canadian shield where the Creighton fault intersects the shores of Lake Ramsey. The city tried to attract new employers and industries through the 1980s and 1990s with mixed success. The city of Sudbury and its suburban communities, which were reorganized into the Regional Municipality of Sudbury in 1973, was subsequently merged in 2001 into the single-tier city of Greater Sudbury.
In 2006, both of the city's major mining companies, Canadian-based Inco and Falconbridge, were taken over by new owners: Inco was acquired by the Brazilian company CVRD (now renamed Vale), while Falconbridge was purchased by the Swiss company Xstrata, which itself was purchased by Anglo–Swiss Glencore, forming Glencore Xstrata. Xstrata donated the historic Edison Building, the onetime head office of Falconbridge, to the city in 2007 to serve as the new home of the municipal archives."Xstrata Nickel donates building to City of Greater Sudbury for community archives" On September 19, 2008, a fire destroyed the historic Sudbury Steelworkers Hall on Frood Road. A strike at Vale's operations, which began on July 13, 2009, was tentatively resolved in July 2010."Vale reaches deal with workers at Sudbury nickel mine". The Gazette, July 5, 2010. The 2009 strike lasted longer than the devastating 1978 strike, but had a much more modest effect on the city's economy than the earlier action—unlike in 1978, the local rate of unemployment declined slightly during the 2009 strike.Adam Radwanski, "Why Sudbury is an unlikely magnet for global education". The Globe and Mail, August 20, 2010.
The ecology of the Sudbury region has recovered dramatically, helped by regreening programs and improved mining practices. The United Nations honoured twelve cities in the world, including Sudbury, with the Local Government Honours Award at the 1992 Earth Summit to recognise the city's community-based environmental reclamation strategies. By 2010, the regreening programs had successfully rehabilitated of land in the city; however, approximately of land have yet to be rehabilitated.
Various studies have confirmed that the provincial government's initial claims that the municipal amalgamation would result in cost savings and increased efficiencies have not borne out, and in fact administration of the amalgamated city costs significantly more than the prior regional government structure did.Ben Leeson, "City of Greater Sudbury must 'die' -- professor". Sudbury Star, March 29, 2017.
Geography
Sudbury has 330 lakes over in size within the city limits. The most prominent is Lake Wanapitei, one of the largest lakes in the world that is completely contained within a municipality. Ramsey Lake, a few kilometres south of downtown Sudbury, held a similar status before the municipal amalgamation in 2001 brought Lake Wanapitei fully inside the city limits. Sudbury is divided into two main watersheds: to the east is the French River watershed which flows into Georgian Bay, and to the west is the Spanish River watershed, which flows into the North Channel of Lake Huron.