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Good morning, Thunder Bay — and welcome to issue one hundred and twelve. Mainly cloudy and 17°C, clearing through the afternoon — a decent Sunday once the early drizzle moves off. In today's issue: the province is putting $2.4 million into working out whether three big upgrades at the pulp mill are worth building; a hundred motorcycles and a run of classic cars hauled Christmas toys across the city on Saturday; ThunderCon is back at the Superior Inn until four this afternoon; and 200 girls spent Friday climbing into helicopters at the airport. Plus the Terry Fox Run, and eight things to do between now and Thursday.
In this Harbour Beat Issue…
Trivia: Reindeer eyes change colour with the seasons — golden through the summer, and something quite different once the Arctic winter settles in. What colour do they turn? (Answer at the bottom!)
It's Here: Pique's New Caffeine-Free Afternoon Energy
I quit my afternoon coffee. Not because I wanted to — because I found something better.
You know that wall you hit every day around 2–3 PM? I used to just accept it as the cost of doing anything. Another coffee, a quick spike, then the crash — and somehow I'd still feel dehydrated by dinner.
Then I tried X·E Fountain, Pique's brand-new electrolyte energy drink, and I genuinely wasn't ready for how good "no crash" could feel.
No caffeine jitters. No 4 PM slump. Just clean, steady energy that actually hydrates me instead of draining me. It's built with a premium Vitamin B Complex for natural cellular energy, Magnesium Malate + Taurate for real focus, and a full electrolyte blend that makes it feel like a treat, not a chore.
The cucumber-celery-lime flavor is so crisp and refreshing — it's basically stolen my afternoon coffee slot completely.
Thunder Bay Events
Today is the crowded one — the convention's second day, the Terry Fox Run and the Battle of Britain ceremony all inside the same couple of hours — and then the week goes quiet until Wednesday, when the Access Expo and the City's water plan open house land on the same day.
Sunday, September 20
SEP 20 · ThunderCon 2026 — day two — 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., tickets at the door · 📍 Superior Inn and Conference Centre, 555 Arthur St. W. · Vendor hall, panels, tabletop gaming and locally made video games, with Jurassic Park and Walking Dead vehicles parked outside. · 📅 Add to Calendar
SEP 20 · Battle of Britain ceremony — arrive 12:15 to 12:30, parade steps off at 1 p.m. · 📍 Lakehead Airman's Memorial Monument, Thunder Bay International Airport · Free and open to the public, with parking on site and refreshments in the terminal Pavilion afterward. · 📅 Add to Calendar
SEP 20 · Thunder Bay Terry Fox Run 5K — 1 to 2 p.m. · 📍 Current River Recreation Centre · The annual non-competitive 5K for cancer research — walk it, run it or push a stroller around it. · 📅 Add to Calendar
Monday, September 21
SEP 21 · Dawson Diner Monday Night Cruise-In — 6:30 p.m. · 📍 Dawson Diner, formerly Sweet G's · The weekly classic-car meet, running while the evenings hold. Bring a car or just wander the lot. · 📅 Add to Calendar
Tuesday, September 22
SEP 22 · Tuesday Group Run — 6:30 p.m. · 📍 Boulevard Lake, Rita Street parking lot · An open weekly group run around the lake. No fee, no pace requirement, just turn up. · 📅 Add to Calendar
Wednesday, September 23
SEP 23 · SCIO Access Expo — 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., free · 📍 Urban Abbey, 308 Red River Rd. · Spinal Cord Injury Ontario brings its travelling expo north: adaptive technology, accessible products and local services, plus food and a community meet-up. Registration is free on the SCIO site. · 📅 Add to Calendar
SEP 23 · Public Information Centre — Water System Master Plan — 5 to 7 p.m. · 📍 563 Oliver Rd. · Drop-in session on how the city plans to run and rebuild its water system over the coming decades, with staff on hand to take comments. · 📅 Add to Calendar
Thursday, September 24
SEP 24 · SHIFT: Is Your Personal Brand on Point? — 5 to 7 p.m., $25 · 📍 Thunder Bay Public Library, Waverley branch · A Chamber of Commerce evening with a social media strategist on sharpening how you show up online. · 📅 Add to Calendar
🌥️ Sunday, September 20 — Thunder Bay
17°C
Overnight low 5°C
Mainly cloudy, clearing in the afternoon. 30% chance of showers or drizzle early. Northeast wind 20 km/h. UV index 5 — moderate.
A grey start that gets better as it goes — mainly cloudy with a 30 per cent chance of showers or drizzle early in the morning, then clearing through the afternoon, with a northeast wind around 20 km/h and a high of 17°C. That is a degree above the September normal of 16°C, and the clearing should arrive in good time for the Terry Fox Run at one. The UV index is 5, moderate, so it still counts once the sun breaks through. Overnight goes clear and cool at plus 5, with cloud building back after midnight and fog patches developing before morning. No alerts are in effect. Sunrise 7:39 a.m., sunset 8:02 p.m. Forecast from Environment Canada.
$2.4 million to find out whether the pulp mill's big upgrades are worth building
The province is putting just over $2.4 million into Thunder Bay Pulp and Paper for three projects: one that cuts the chemicals used to bleach pulp, one that cuts energy use, and one that lifts daily kraft production by 11 per cent. The money is not building any of them. Chief executive Norm Bush puts the full package somewhere near $170 to $180 million, and says the provincial funding covers the engineering work that decides whether the projects are economically sound before anyone commits to them.
If they do go ahead, the mill expects the upgrades to cut its dependence on chemicals by roughly 30 per cent, and the boiler work to cut natural gas use by more than five million cubic metres a year — about what it takes to heat 2,000 northern Ontario homes — while opening a market for more than 130,000 tonnes of forest biomass annually. Associate minister of forestry and forest products Kevin Holland put the employment case at roughly 700 jobs inside the mill and another 3,350 outside it, in sawmills, bush crews and hauling. He also pointed at the province's Forest Biomass Program as a hedge against US tariffs, which have already idled several sawmills across the northwest, and argued idled capacity can be restarted once markets turn.
🗳️ Your call: Public money, a private mill, and a sector that keeps getting knocked around by tariffs. Where should forestry dollars go?
Ontario is putting $2.4 million into engineering work at Thunder Bay Pulp and Paper. Where should forestry money in the northwest go?
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A hundred bikes, a row of classic cars, and Christmas in September
The Salvation Army's Journey to Life Centre ran its 43rd annual Toys for Tots ride on Saturday, out from Harley-Davidson on Arthur Street and across the city to the centre on Cumberland. Executive director Gary Ferguson counted at least 100 motorcycles and a still-uncounted run of classic cars — only the second year cars have been part of it — every one of them carrying toys and stuffed animals for children whose families would otherwise come up short at Christmas.
Construction forced a route change this year and Ferguson said it made no difference: the cars and the bikes stayed together and other drivers gave them room. J D'Angelo, who rides with the Road Angels, came in from Shuniah for her third year and said the point is the cause rather than the ride — “it feels so cool to be with everybody riding all for the same cause.” Darrell Eckman brought a 1967 Triumph Spitfire, now running a 572 crate engine, and offered the other half of the logic: it is for a good cause, and any excuse to take the car out is a good one.
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ThunderCon found a new home, and it runs until four today
ThunderCon moved to the Superior Inn this year, and media coordinator Adam Riley says the new space let organizers spread things out — a vendor hall, panels, tabletop and role-playing games, an outdoor stage, costumed groups, and a pair of Jurassic Park vehicles and a Walking Dead vehicle parked outside. Guests this year include voice actor Katie Griffin, Gary Chalk and Dan Payne, several of them sitting on panels about the work.
It is run as a non-profit, and this year's proceeds go to the Terry Fox Foundation, Our Kids Count, the St. John Ambulance Therapy Dog Program and Autism Ontario. Local game developers are getting a proper showcase too: Games on the Lake, a Thunder Bay collective that pairs the city's computer science and art communities, is building a game live on the floor, with attendees contributing drawings that become in-game weapons and volunteers getting scanned in as enemies. Day two runs 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and tickets are available at the door.
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Two hundred girls, one helicopter seat, and a lot of questions
More than 200 girls between eight and 18 spent Friday at Confederation College's Aviation Centre of Excellence for the Thunder Bay Airport's first Girls in Aviation Day. Jackie MacDonald, the airport's director of business development and revenue management, said the point was breadth — that aviation is not only pilots, but maintenance engineers, air traffic controllers, flight attendants and everything that keeps an airport running — and chipping away at the assumption that the industry is a men's business.
It seems to have worked on at least two of them. Sage Ruby, a Grade 12 student at Superior Collegiate, came specifically to ask how to get into the aircraft maintenance technician program and left knowing more about the rest of the field than she expected. Emmille Hudson, just starting Grade 9 at St. Ignatius, sat in a helicopter cockpit and decided planes were too much responsibility but helicopters were more her style. She also had a line about why the day mattered: “we are very capable of doing a lot of things — more capable than ever.”
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Trivia answer: Blue. The tapetum lucidum — the mirror-like layer behind the retina that makes animal eyes flash in headlights — shifts from gold in summer to a deep blue in winter in Arctic reindeer, scattering more light around inside the eye so they can still see through months of twilight. Researchers working with Svalbard reindeer published the finding in 2013.
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