Northern Lights Festival Boréal is an annual summer music festival in Sudbury, Ontario. It is one of Canada's oldest, continuous music festivals, having been staged every year since 1972 until the Covid-19 pandemic. Only the Mariposa Folk Festival is older, but it was not staged in 1980-81. The bilingual festival is held at Bell Park, including the Grace Hartman Amphitheatre, on the shores of Ramsey Lake. A diverse program of music is presented in a variety of genres, including arts, crafts and children's entertainment, and featuring a mix of national, international and Northern Ontario artists and performers. Musicians at the festival typically participate in concert performances and workshop sessions, collaborating with several other musicians. In addition to the main festival, the organizing committee also sponsors concerts and other cultural events in the city throughout the year. During the festival weekend, a lineup of artists also performs downtown at the Townehouse. The festival is usually held on the first weekend in July, although it was postponed until the last weekend of the month in 1988 to serve as the cultural festival for the 1988 World Junior Championships in Athletics, which were held in the city. Most commonly held over three days from Friday to Sunday, at various times in its history the festival has also taken place over one, two or four days. History The festival was founded by a group of volunteers in 1972. It incorporated in 1975 at which time artists also began to be paid for performing. The festival has always been multicultural, including Ukrainian, Indian and Croatian Canadians at the first festival, and Indigenous artists since the third. Among the highlights over the years: In the 1970s, Colin Linden, then 14 years old, appeared at the festival. Canadian folk musician Stan Rogers wrote one of his most famous songs, "Barrett's Privateers," while at the festival. The song was written for a collaborative performance session with the band, Friends of Fiddler's Green. In the 1980s, the festival was one of the first major venues to book Shania Twain, then 10 years old. The 1990 event saw the first collaborative performance by folk musicians James Keelaghan and Oscar Lopez, who later recorded two Juno Award-nominated albums together as the Compadres. In 1992, the festival was profiled in the TVOntario series, Putting On the Arts. In 1999, pop singer Amanda Marshall announced a concert in the city on a date