GM Plant back when it was open. Photo: St. Catharines Standard. 

For a majority of my stay, I have been in St. Catharines with my mom and dad. I lived in St. Catharines from 1986 (14 years old) until I moved to Toronto in 1992 (19 years old). The city hasn’t changed much in new buildings and new condominiums like Toronto. It is still mostly an eastern European kind of place with few other cultures. I still remember my ex-boyfriend commenting how St. Catharines is “the whitest place he has ever been.”

The city is struggling and it is easy to see where and how. It used to be a huge manufacturing centre for the province with General Motors (GM) and an auto parts companies as well as pulp and paper mills like Domtar. GM closed its last plant last week. The pulp and paper mills have turned into restaurants. The jobs are mostly in the service industry such as restaurants, bars, donut places, grocery stores and such. They are lower paying jobs at $7 an hour compared to the $20 an hour in the manufacturing industry. Niagara Falls is only 10 minutes away so a lot of people have jobs there at the casino or other tourism industry sites.

The population is the oldest in Canada and it is easy to see without reading it. There are tons of old people around. A bar my father frequents looks more like an old age home than a bar with everyone well in their 70’s or even a few in their 80’s.  The people are good where they will help a neighbour. Most have lived in the area all their lives so there is a strong sense of community.

It is known as the “garden city” due to the numerous public parks and gardens that are constantly being used. There are more boarded up businesses in the downtown area. There is some construction with a new hospital being built and large “big box” stores being built in the western part of the city. The population on the sign is 125,000 but I wonder how true that is. Talking to an old high school friend of mine, he mentions how he rarely sees anyone from the “good old days” anymore. Most of the people who have moved out to live in the Toronto area or leave the country like me.

To me the best way of solving this is by bringing in cheap transportation such as the commuter train called GO. This would bring more people who could live in St Catharines and work in Toronto. It is only an hour and a half away and people are now willing to commute 2 or 3 hours by going up to the cities of Barrie and Orillia. These new people will increase property values and create some construction jobs as well. Living here is cheap with the average house going for about $100,000 CDN. With this new money in the form of taxes, funds could be used to change the manufacturing base to one of green energy. The people here know how to build things maybe there could be a desire to build more wind turbines and such.

Something needs to be done here or I fear things will get worse here.