The Northern Democracy Initiative (NDI), which began in 2014, is an on-going, not-for-profit, academic research and knowledge mobilization project based out of Laurentian University in Sudbury in Northern Ontario. This community-centred project is motivated by concerns about declining employment conditions, increasing poverty and economic disparity, and deteriorating social and cultural opportunities in many resource-dependent communities in Northern Ontario and other hinterland-colonial regions. The project focuses on the Timmins region which was formed as a City in 1973 through a massive amalgamation that encompassed three mining towns, Schumacher, South Porcupine, and Porcupine. The project examines in depth how and why these once-vibrant communities declined following amalgamation, and the clash of theories and policies about their decline, particularly the role of municipal restructuring and regional conditions in the decline. The project also examines the dominance of neoliberal policies and their differential distributional impacts on communities, diminished local democracy, and their  consequences in future community development including the major challenges of population decline, resource limits, and decolonization.
Funding Provided By:
J. P. Bickell Foundation
Schumacher Foundation
Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council