16 Facts About Northern Ontario

Northern Ontario is a primary geographic and quasi-administrative region of the Canadian province of Ontario, the other primary region being Southern Ontario.

The extended federal and provincial quasi-administrative regions of Northern Ontario have their own boundaries even further south in the transitional area that vary according to their respective government policies and requirements.

Some purposes, Northern Ontario is further subdivided into Northeastern and Northwestern Ontario.

At the time of Canadian Confederation in 1867, the portion of Northern Ontario lying south of the Laurentian Divide was part of Ontario, whilst the portion north of the divide was part of the separate British territory of Rupert's Land.

The Ontario government was reluctant to establish new districts in the north, partly because the northern and western boundaries of Ontario were in dispute after Confederation.

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Unlike the counties and regional municipalities of Southern Northern Ontario, which have a government and administrative structure and jurisdiction over specified government services, a district lacks that level of administration.

Statistically, the districts in Northern Ontario are Rainy River, Kenora, Thunder Bay, Cochrane, Timiskaming, Algoma, Sudbury, Nipissing and Manitoulin.

All of Northeastern Northern Ontario is within the Eastern time zone; Northwestern Northern Ontario is split between the Eastern and Central time zones.

Under the staples thesis of Canadian economic history, Northern Ontario is a "hinterland" or "periphery" region, whose economic development has been defined primarily by providing raw natural resource materials to larger and more powerful business interests from elsewhere in Canada or the world.

Northern Ontario has had difficulty in recent years maintaining both its economy and its population.

Northern Ontario has generally been one of the weakest areas in all of Canada for both the federal Progressive Conservative and Conservative parties, as well as one of the weakest areas for the provincial Progressive Conservatives.

One consequence of this, for example, is that a politician who represents a Northern Ontario riding in the House of Commons of Canada or the Legislative Assembly of Ontario must typically maintain a much higher budget for travel and office expenses than one who represents a small urban district does.

In 1999 the Northeastern Ontario Municipal Association, a committee consisting of the mayors of 14 Northern Ontario municipalities, wrote a letter to Prime Minister Jean Chretien asking him to outline the necessary conditions for the region to secede from Ontario to form a new province.

Northern Ontario is the only provincial or territorial subregion in Canada that sends its own teams to the Brier and the Tournament of Hearts separately from its province.

Northern Ontario has hosted the 1981 Canada Summer Games, 1988 World Junior Championships in Athletics, FIS Nordic World Ski Championships 1995 and 2003 Continental Cup of Curling.

Four reserves were not counted due to permission not being given, and another 13 in Northwestern Northern Ontario were not counted due to evacuations caused by forest fires.