Sault should stop expecting a saviour to bring jobs

In the 40 years of my employable life we’ve been the persona of human resources in an employer friendly economic environment due to an unacceptable high rate of unemployment.

Making personal sacrifices for gainful employment is what’s expected of us, even when those jobs place our health, safety and sanity at risk. Social services and safety nets are being clawed back alongside a steady decline in jobs from both the private and the public sectors wishing to reduce their operational expenses to further their financial goals. People are being penalized and their lives are being sacrificed for the greater good of the very institutions that are supposedly here to serve the public interest. For 300 jobs, one city finds it impossible to sensibly weigh the pros and cons of allowing in an industry that risks the wellbeing of the 90,000 citizens of our twin cities. So I strongly suggest to anyone that favours hosting a ferrochrome smelter in the vicinity of either Sault Ste. Marie ‘solely upon the grounds that our cities needs jobs’ should try scratching a little deeper beneath the surface and seriously reconsider their position.

Nothing measures up to the importance of job creation … no environmental issues, negative health effects, or risks of industrial accidents has even the remotest chance of swaying people’s minds – nothing. We were in the 2017 race to the bottom to offer the Amazon corporation the biggest incentives for the sake of jobs. That was the same sort of bidding war running rampant across the globe allowing larger corporations to essentially extort prospective host cities by holding the jobs they offer hostage until an adequate financial incentive or ‘ransom’ from the city is guaranteed. This corporate exploitation of any city’s desperation to procure jobs for its citizens in exchange for financial incentives is only going to further degrade both the local economic environment and the people’s living standards. Reducing the amount of revenue an industry must pay the municipality will erode an ever increasing proportion of the benefit those jobs intend on bringing. Noront is guilty of initiating this insincere competition in order to maximize any benefit their presence could extract from the city and people of Sault Ste. Marie. Our mayor has fallen heavily into their CEO Alan Coutts’s well-laid trap, and by using his own family as a selling point has become Noront’s special envoy. As their newly recruited, yet unofficial spokesperson, Christian Provenzano is pitching to the city he’s been elected to represent, a line that only has the best interests of Noront Resources at heart. As our representative his first responsibility was to find out whether we actually wanted a ferrochrome smelter nestled in our back yard.

Whatever happened to old-fashioned bribery that allowed disreputable characters to gain admittance into any establishment for the right price? Under those old-fashioned rules, an industry of questionable environmental integrity would offer considerable financial incentives towards the host city in compensation for the risks they bring. Nowadays, what an industry does no longer seems relevant in the face of a nation’s job desperation. Morality, equality, social justice, democracy, and the health of our environment suffer unduly at the hands of maintaining economic growth. If Noront wanted to feel welcomed in Sault Ste Marie, they’d surely have brought the obligatory gift dictated by social etiquette and offered the host a sign of appreciation. Instead they’re offering us the jobs they’re going to find essential to their business’s success… which will be of far greater value to the company than to the city or the employees themselves. Noront’s proposing to make a lot of money locating a potentially dangerous ferrochrome smelter on our doorstep, operating it using our resources, and exploiting our labour force to do the work. And they’re expecting something further from us to sweeten the pot – such as incentives to make coming here worth their while?!? This next level in the ongoing business shift from sharing the wealth with those who enable it to flipping them the bill for the expenses incurred during its making is preposterous. The Sault stands to take the physical risks, while Noront makes off like bandits.

Cities are the living spaces for people, not pools of human resources for industry’s convenience. If we’re willing to co-operate with our neighbours, we may put an end to the industrial abuses steam rolling over the people’s needs instead of competing with one another to win those abuses. If the extraction industry’s so important to the health of our economies, it should be able to afford the host community some of the generated wealth as compensation instead of demanding sacrifices to assist in making their whole venture profitable. So, we can continue along this subservient route by putting Noront’s interests ahead of our own and accept their ferrochrome smelter, we could keep industrializing Whitefish Bay with additional such industries and go on indefinitely siphoning off just enough of the wealth to allow us to keep it flowing smoothly out of the city, or we can say no. We should stop expecting a saviour to bring us jobs and begin looking out for our interests. Let’s build some self-sufficiency and keep the wealth we’re able to generate here, circulating here by growing, harvesting, producing and manufacturing the things we need to live here, right here instead of foolishly spending our wealth buying everything we need from somewhere else.

Bruce Brooks

Sault Ste. Marie