Thomas Blampied
In the run up to the 2018 Ontario provincial election, Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford spoke about his party’s plans for the Ring of Fire mining development in Northern Ontario. The project, which experts claimed could be worth billions of dollars, was stalled as the federal and provincial governments negotiated with mining companies over who would pay for the necessary access roads and other infrastructure. In his largely unsuccessful attempt to win votes in Northern Ontario, Ford had an answer. Speaking three months before the election, he explained that the Ring of Fire would “benefit everyone in Ontario” and that he would see it built, even “If I have to hop on that bulldozer myself … we’re going to start building the roads to get to the mining.”[1]
His promise echoes one made by Liberal Premier George Ross at the start of the 20thcentury as Queen’s Park sought to open New Ontario (as Northeastern Ontario was then known) to settlement and resource extraction. In Ross’s case, however, the mining road was the provincially-owned Temiskaming & Northern Ontario Railway (T&NO, renamed the Ontario Northland in 1946), one of the Ontario government’s first transportation projects.[2] The means of legally extending the government’s reach across this land was through treaty.
View on the T. & N. O. Railway (Canadian Mining Review, vol. 24, no. 5 (May 1905), p. 95
Ross’s fixation on building a provincially-owned railway was an attempt to prove to the electorate that his government was committed to the economy by opening up the Temiskaming district, which had no railways at the turn of the 20thcentury. At the time, the closest railway to the region was the Canadian Pacific at North Bay, and Ross feared it would siphon off trade as its mainline ran to Montreal and bypassed Toronto altogether. To prevent this, Ross sent ten survey parties to examine possible routes for a new railway stretching as far north as James Bay.[3] The initial survey area was covered by the 1850 Robinson-Huron Treaty between the Crown and local Anishinaabe communities. By 1905, both Toronto and Ottawa were pushing Treaty 9 to ensure clear title for all the land to Hudson Bay – land that would be needed for mining, timber and the T&NO. In their separate work on this treaty, John Long and Alanis Obomsawin have shown how the federal and provincial governments’ deliberate distortion of the treaty process in the early 20th century was a way of accessing these resources by displacing and containing Indigenous inhabitants while also claiming title over the North.[4]
During its convention earlier this month, the Ontario PC Party passed a resolution calling gender identity 
