The Current on Welland

For the past two days, CBC's The Current has been airing a documentary on the small Niagara city of Welland.

This is a city where I lived as a child. In the late 1950s and early 60s, it was a thriving steel and manufacturing centre, with plentiful factory jobs and a robust economic base. When I moved back to Niagara in 1996 to teach at Brock University, it was a depressing model of rust-belt hopelessness. East Welland, where most of the plants had been located, had become a vast slum. The only thriving businesses appeared to be cheque-cashing stores and pornography.

Over the past decade, it has only gotten worse. The only growth business now is, according to the show, addiction treatment. As Robert Stone wrote so eloquently thirty-five years ago, when people encounter despair and hopelessness, they are naturally going to want to get high. It is not a drug problem -- it is a hope problem.

In a country that has just allowed the technological foundation of Nortel to move offshore when options existed, it is difficult to envision a rebirth of industrial centres like this. But we should remind ourselves that in the U.S. similar urban areas such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Indianapolis have done just that.