A gentler week than the last one. Ontario Culture Days programming runs straight through it, Wednesday stacks the Access Expo and the City's water plan open house into the same day, and Badanai Theatre's run of Come From Away picks back up Thursday.

Monday, September 21

Tuesday, September 22

Wednesday, September 23

Thursday, September 24

Friday, September 25

⚠️ FROST ADVISORY — Environment Canada

Patchy frost overnight into Monday morning with the low near plus 1. Cover tender plants, and expect to scrape the windshield. Clear skies Monday night bring the low to around zero, so frost is likely again before Tuesday.

☀️ Monday, September 21 — Thunder Bay

Overnight low 0°C

Fog patches early, then a mix of sun and cloud becoming sunny near noon. No precipitation expected. Light winds. UV index 5 — moderate.

Generation Mining has its money. The Toronto company said this week it has closed the full financing package for its billion-dollar copper-palladium project at Marathon — 10 kilometres north of the town, out along the north shore — and construction starts this fall. On Friday the province added $11 million on top of that, the first payout from the $500-million Critical Minerals Processing Fund it launched last December, to help build a $410-million processing plant complex next to the open pit.

The fund exists to stop Ontario ore being shipped overseas for processing, and the government was not shy about it: economic development minister Vic Fedeli called the project “generational,” and energy and mines minister Stephen Lecce framed it as a project of consequence for the country. On the ground the numbers are more concrete — roughly 800 construction jobs over a two-year build, a permanent site workforce rising from 400 to 450 once the plant is in, an initial 13-year mine life, and an offtake deal that sends the concentrate to Glencore smelters in Quebec from 2028. Biigtigong Nishnaabeg, 15 kilometres from the site, signed a community benefits agreement with Gen Mining back in 2022. Chief Duncan Michano said the negotiations were “intense sometimes,” then used the announcement to float an Indigenous-focused mining and trades school for the north shore: “we need to build that capacity.”

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🗳️ Your call: $500 million is set aside for processing, and this is the first cheque out the door. Where should the rest of it go?

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Hundreds of runners, walkers and a good number of dogs made their way from the Current River Community Centre to the Adelaide Butterfly Garden on Sunday afternoon. Don Morrison, who chairs Thunder Bay's Terry Fox Run as a community service project of the Lakehead Rotary Club, said the numbers looked well up on last year and the weather held: 96 participants and 17 teams were registered by Friday evening, with plenty more signing on after, and more than $25,000 raised for cancer research.

The route is about five kilometres with a water station halfway, and a colour guard drawn from running clubs across the city — the Metre Eaters, the Lakehead University varsity club, Up River Running — started it off. This year's shirt carried the phrase “finish it,” which Morrison explained plainly enough: Terry Fox knew he could not finish the run himself, and asked Canadians to finish it for him. Morrison lost both of his parents and a younger brother to cancer, and says he will keep doing this as long as he can. His grandson Levi was out on the course too, and had his own reason — he finds it amazing, he said, that a man ran that far on one leg.

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Confederation College's paramedic students have a new-to-them ambulance to train in. Ornge, the province's air-ambulance service, donated a land ambulance to the college's paramedic programs on Friday — “gently used,” as chief operating officer Wade Durham put it, “but in much better shape than what they currently have.”

The college does already own one; associate vice-president academic Shane Strickland says it is on its last legs. The replacement matters because a real chunk of the program happens inside the vehicle — there is an ambulance operations course where students learn to drive one, run the lights and work in the back. The partnership runs both ways: Ornge recently hired six of the ten students in the college's advanced care paramedic program, which is the qualification you need to work for them. Forty students are currently in the primary care course, with another ten in advanced care.

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Somebody kept very good notes in the engine room of the SS Bayton through 1965, and sixty years later that habit has become science. The ship's engineer — whose name researchers could not determine — logged surface water temperatures at regular intervals as the vessel worked across the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence from April to December that year, because running a steamship efficiently means knowing how cold the water is. The logbook sat in the archives at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie until biology professor Michael Twiss and undergraduate research assistant Hannah Logan published a paper built on it.

The value is the gap it fills. Buoys did not start measuring lake temperatures until the 1980s and high-resolution satellites not until the mid-1990s, and what older data exists mostly comes from water treatment plants sitting close to shore. The Bayton crossed open water. Logan used the ship's recorded travel times and waypoints to work out roughly where each reading was taken, which turns a stack of engine-room numbers into a baseline that predates the modern record — a firmer footing, as she puts it, for understanding how the lakes are changing now. The Bayton made its last Great Lakes voyage in 1966.

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