Gezza

Have looked at lots of pictures of Sudbury and it looks very much like Calgary, except perhaps more variety in vegetation and of course no mountains. Could someone please tell me what job market is like there, schools, crime, house prices? A place a for a young family?

Appreciate any advice.

Gezza

Pretty Flowers

AFAIK Sudbury is well off the beaten track.... Its industry is dominated by iron and steel production. The highlight of the Sudbury film festival is watching them empty the iron smelters....

I guess its pretty much small town Canada...

HTH

dbd33

Nickel mining was the industry, when there was industry. A tough post industrial place with high unemployment and brutually cold weather. It pleases me that people who work for Revenue Canada have to live there.

Souvenir

Industry remains dominated by mining (not iron and steel). Inco and Falconbridge are easily the largest industrial employers. As dbd indicated, though, most people work for either one of the sundry levels of government or in health/education.

If Inco and/or Falconbridge pack up their tents (probably not very likely but these things can happen and they tend to happen suddenly), Sudbury's economic base would be knackered. It would be a government town.

Pretty Flowers

In my defence, I haven't visited Sudbury, the Editor of HWMBO's latest film lives there, and he spent a weekend over there at the end of the Sudbury Film Festival in October. Nothing I have said would ever stand up in a court of law

iaink

If memory serves Sudbury has some of the worst air quality in Canada, as well as the most poluting industrial sources.

Souvenir

Could well be. Nickel smelters are nasty things. All sorts of horrid heavy metals involved there.

sysclp

I know someone who lives there. She said yesterday the snow was up to the door knob on the front and wasn't looking forward to having to shovel out. And it is eary in the season so not a "bad" snow yet! You have to drive an SUV (a real one meant for bad roads, not the fancy crap people drive in town) or you won't go anywhere in winter. High unemployment area with mining being the major industry along with government offices. She is self-employed (writer) and her husband is a long haul truck driver.

If you really want to move there, I wouldn't go unless I already had a job lined up. Better really LOVE snow and cold weather too.

dbd33

Also the landscape, Canadians romanticise stony ground and laud the Group of Seven, but you can't grow anything and, after a while, one rock looks a lot like the next.

Steve_P

We drove through Sudbury on our way to Ottawa in 1972 don't remember much about the place other than it looked pretty desolate (lots of rock not many trees).

I could be wrong here, but I seem to remember back in the days of the first moon landings. That NASA used the terrain around Sudbury to train astronauts.

dbd33

I can believe that, it's empty and there are huge boulders strewn about, very bleak. There are also a great number of abandoned houses along the side of the road from Sudbury to the Soo suggesting that plenty of people failed to make a go of the north. Brrrrrr.

Steve_P

Yep I was right.

This is a quote from the Wikipedia page on Sudbury.

"Sudbury was known for many years as a wasteland. During the Apollo manned lunar exploration program, NASA astronauts trained in Sudbury, to become familiar with shatter cones, a rare rock formation connected with meteorite impacts. However, the popular misconception that they were visiting Sudbury because it resembled the lifeless surface of the moon dogged the city for years."

From what I remember that misconception wasn't far wrong.

Cheers
Steve

Gezza

Oh Dear! And what about Thunder Bay?

hot wasabi peas

It's stinky. Seriously. If the wind is blowing the wrong way, the whole place smells like a rotten egg and everytime I've been there, the wind was blowing the wrong way.

dbd33

Big ski jump, home of Shania Twain. I went there once and couldn't see anything from the car windows as the roads were slots in the snow with 20' ice walls. Less people than Sudbury, less smell, worse weather.