Wednesday is the busy one — the Access Expo at midday and the City's water plan open house at supper. Ontario Culture Days runs underneath the whole week, and the weekend brings an artisan show out the Slate River valley and tango at St. Paul's.

Tuesday, September 22

Wednesday, September 23

Thursday, September 24

Friday, September 25

Saturday, September 26

✅ NO WEATHER ALERTS IN EFFECT

Environment Canada had nothing posted for Thunder Bay as of Monday evening — last night's frost advisory has come down. The only thing to drive around is fog patches early Tuesday, which should burn off through the morning.

☀️ Tuesday, September 22 — Thunder Bay

Overnight low 3°C

Sunny, with fog patches dissipating in the morning. No precipitation expected. Light winds.

The federal government published a notice in the Canada Gazette on Friday saying it is considering listing the Nuclear Waste Management Organization's deep geological repository under the Building Canada Act — the law meant to move major projects along faster. It is the first formal step toward designating the project one of national interest, something Ottawa signalled it intended to do back in June.

What that designation would actually do is bundle all federal permitting into one coordinated framework. A federal spokesperson put it more bluntly in an email: it would shift the question from whether the project should go ahead to how. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission would still issue the licences and still be independently responsible for whether the thing is built safely. The repository itself is a network of tunnels and storage rooms 650 to 800 metres down in the Canadian Shield, on a site between Ignace and Wabigoon Lake First Nation, holding used fuel from Canada's reactors starting sometime in the 2040s. Public comments on the federal proposal are open by email until October 26, alongside consultation with Indigenous communities.

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🗳️ Your call: the comment window is open until October 26. Should the fast-track apply to a project like this one?

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About 370 people sat down to breakfast at the Valhalla on Monday morning for the United Way of Thunder Bay's campaign launch. Chief executive Albert Brulé did not name a target — the organization dropped public goals a few years ago, deciding participation was the better thing to chase — but he expects roughly $1.8 million to come in this year, spread across children and families, homelessness and food security.

Brulé's read on the moment was plain enough: financial anxiety is high, and people here are struggling to meet basic needs. The pitch is that it does not take much from any one person — a payroll deduction, an hour volunteering, or just turning up to something like the Ultimate Burger Battle. Deputy police chief Jeremy Pearson told the room about doing Sleepless in Thunder Bay, the United Way's overnight event that puts community leaders out on the street, and what it shifted for him. Coming up: the Dew Drop Inn's Take Home Dinner on October 21, Wasaya's murder-mystery night on November 21, and a new December raffle with a dozen cars on offer.

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Transportation minister Prabmeet Sarkaria announced Monday that Ontario will have a new set of training requirements for commercial truck drivers in place by early 2027, with “more than 103 hours” of instruction and possible new modules on northern, rural and remote driving, fatigue management and mandatory air brake training.

Thunder Bay–Superior North MPP Lise Vaugeois, a long-standing critic on northern highway safety, was unimpressed. Ontario already requires 103.5 hours under the mandatory entry level training program brought in back in 2017, she pointed out, and if the hour count is not going up, her question is what is being taken out to make room. Her larger argument is that the problem was never the curriculum — it is that nobody is checking. She cited the auditor general's finding of well over 3,000 instances of unregistered schools sending people for testing, and wants to know how many inspectors the province plans to hire, what their qualifications will be, and what happens to a company caught cutting corners that simply reopens a week later under a new name. “I want to believe this is going to work,” she said. “We need this to work.”

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The City is updating its water system master plan, and Wednesday evening is the public's turn at it. The point of the exercise, says water and wastewater engineer Joshua Daniels, is a 20-year roadmap of the infrastructure upgrades needed to support the growth targets in the Smart Growth Action Plan — where the system is going to pinch, and what to do about it at five years, at 10 to 15, and at 20.

Folded into that work is the lead problem. Roughly 8,000 homes in Thunder Bay still have old service pipes that leach lead into the tap water, and the City has a consultant looking at how best to bring those levels within provincial guidelines. The current approach is filters for affected homeowners, plus an interest-free loan and grant program to help people replace the connection to their house. Staff and the consultant will present the study findings and take questions at a drop-in session from 5 to 7 p.m. on September 23 at the Oliver Road Community Centre.

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Lakehead University staff, students and members of the local Métis community gathered on Monday to mark Powley Day — the anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada's September 19, 2003 decision in R. v. Powley. The university holds the commemoration every year.

The case began with Steve Powley and his son, and was carried by the Métis Nation of Ontario, the Powley family and the Métis community around Sault Ste. Marie all the way to the country's highest court. “It set out that identified Indigenous communities, Métis communities, had certain rights under Section 35 that allowed them to harvest in their area where they were living and tied back to historically,” said Wendy Houston, president of the Thunder Bay and District Métis Council. “We're here and we're not going away.”

Métis Nation of Ontario Senator Grant Robbins, who also holds the title of Captain of the Hunt, explained at the event what that right looks like in practice — he reviews harvester applications and forwards them to the registry, which connects each one back to a historic community. Not every Métis person holds a harvester's card, and a card tied to one part of the province does not travel. Harvesting itself is broader than hunting and fishing: herbs, plants, wild fruit. “It's not always about taking,” Houston said. “It's about preserving that for the rest of our ancestors too.” Denise Baxter, the university's vice-provost of Indigenous initiatives, said the point of hosting it is the platform: Métis voices are often not at the front of the conversation, and a university is one place they can be.

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Build & Thrive Thunder Bay

Host: Robert Downing

The argument this week is that your website now has a second audience. Alongside the customers reading it, AI systems are scraping it to work out what your business actually does — and if the site is vague about your services, your area or your hours, that is the version that gets repeated back to people asking about you. Ten minutes on writing a site that answers the questions plainly enough for a machine to get them right.

In this episode:

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What’s faster than word of mouth? The Harbour Beat Spotlight! Keeps you updated on what’s going on locally and connects businesses to our vibrant community.