The long weekend is over and the week fills up fast: the Resource Expo takes the Gardens floor midweek, a very loud Thursday on Red River Road, and then two big outdoor weekends stacked on top of each other. ⛅ Showers are in the forecast Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday — check with the organizer before anything outdoors.

Tuesday, September 8

Wednesday, September 9

Thursday, September 10

Friday, September 11

Saturday, September 12

You voted, the ballot closed Saturday night, and here is what Thunder Bay picked across all 15 categories. 123 businesses were on the ballot.

See the full results, including runners-up →

Honest note: 28 ballots came in for our first run at this, so treat it as a friendly temperature check rather than the final word — several categories were close enough to finish in a tie for runner-up. We will do it again, and we would love a bigger turnout next time.

Congratulations to every business on this list, and thank you to everyone who took the two minutes. This was your list, not ours.

✅ NO WEATHER ALERTS IN EFFECT

Environment Canada had no watches or warnings posted for Thunder Bay as of Monday evening — but there is a risk of a thunderstorm this morning and again this afternoon, and a local 20 to 30 mm of rain is possible. Latest alerts at Environment Canada.

🌧️ Tuesday, September 8 — Thunder Bay

Overnight low 14°C

Showers ending late in the afternoon · risk of a thunderstorm morning and afternoon · local 20–30 mm · south wind 20 km/h · humidex 29 · UV index 3 (moderate)

Shanteal Letain applied for before-and-after school care on August 14. She is still on a waitlist with no answer, and she has a deadline: she has been accepted into a pre-apprenticeship program at Confederation College and has to confirm by September 14. Without care for her 10-year-old son, she says, she will have to turn it down. He is in the gap — old enough that a spot is hard to find, too young to walk home alone.

More spaces have opened. That is the frustrating part. Dawnette Hoard, manager of childcare and early years programs at the Thunder Bay District Social Services Administration Board, says the funding is in place under the national child care agreement — what is missing is qualified people. Heather Harris, superintendent of education at Lakehead District School Board, tells the same story from the school side: third-party operators could not expand because they could not staff up, so the board started running its own extended-day programs as a pilot at Five Mile and Gorham Ware. This year it adds Elsie McGill, Crestview and McKenzie — about 60 more spots, kindergarten through Grade 6. Hoard's practical advice for families waiting: keep the application updated and check your junk folder, because that is where the offer email lands. And she is blunt about what the job actually is. “These are professionals who do take a two-year college diploma to work with children,” she said. “We don't just want anyone caring for our children.”

Read more →

🗳️ Your call: the cheques are written and the spaces still aren't there. What actually breaks the logjam?

Load Queen Services collects tires from about 300 sites across Northwestern Ontario — garages and landfills as far west as Fort Frances, Dryden and Kenora. Right now roughly 20,000 of them are sitting on the company's own property, waiting on appointments to be hauled to a processor. Owner Janice Woodbeck says the wait has been running about a year, and the company only gets paid once the tires ship. Five employees have been laid off.

The limit on her property is 5,000 tires, and she is over it — a violation she says she reported herself. “I have nothing to hide,” she said. The company has moved to a bigger site so the piles can be stored to fire code and is applying for an Environmental Compliance Approval, a process that can take a year. Woodbeck's bigger worry is not her own yard, which she says is packaged and managed properly, but the smaller communities. “I'm more concerned about places like Dryden and Kenora and some of the smaller communities that have forest fires around them.” Meanwhile the phone keeps going: “They want tire pickups, but we're limited as to what we can do.” She wants Ontario's system changed so garages and dealers can deal directly with the organizations that fund tire recycling.

Read more →

The Hymers Fall Fair closed out the long weekend with record attendance — about 450 more people than last year, according to Laura Loan, president of the Hymers Agricultural Society. Vendor spots sold out too. “We were not able to put anybody else on the grounds, which was great,” she said, laughing.

Admission was $10, or $5 for seniors and kids under five — and $1 if you turned up with a zucchini or a sunflower, which the fair then donates. Two stages ran all day, one of them built around kids, with crafts and activities alongside the music. Loan's point about why it still works is a good one: the fair pulls in the farming families it was built for, but it also pulls in city residents who have never stood beside a cattle show or a horse show before. “It's really nice to see, especially if you're not used to those things, to be able to come out and actually take part in a rural lifestyle.”

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Between 1943 and about 1980, miners across Northern Ontario — including in Red Lake — were required to inhale finely ground aluminum dust before their shifts. It was called McIntyre Powder, and it was sold to the industry as a way to head off silicosis claims. Men exposed to it went on to develop cardiovascular, respiratory and neurological illness. One of them was Janice Hobbs Martell's father, Jim, who died of Parkinson's in 2017.

Hobbs Martell started the McIntyre Powder Project in 2015 to find the other men and get them recognized. Now the whole story is going into print: “Dusted: The Men of the McIntyre Powder Experiment,” out from Dundurn Press in April 2027. She wrote it in five months using vacation days and banked time, and describes the process as cathartic — “I felt a sense of lightness that I have not felt in the 11 years that I've been doing this.” Her argument in the final section is the one that lands closest to home up here, with critical-minerals development ramping up across the North: she does not think of this as a legacy issue. “The last time that we allowed the Northern Ontario mining industry to have their way, they shifted their compensation liability onto the workers.”

Read more →

Wake the Giant takes over the Marina Park festival grounds on Saturday, September 12, gates at 11 a.m. It started here in 2019 with a plain goal — help the city recognize racism, celebrate Indigenous culture, and make Thunder Bay a place Indigenous students can actually land in. Every year it works as one big welcome party for the youth who move here from their home communities to attend Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School.

It is presented by the Northern Nishnawbe Education Council, and the festival is only the loudest part of it. The same organization runs cultural awareness training, student orientation programming, and the community decal initiative — the window stickers you have seen on businesses around town, marking themselves as welcoming spaces. This year's lineup is Flo Rida, The Wallflowers, Tia Wood, Shawnee Kish, Plain White T's and Sebastian Gaskin, with round dances, traditional drums and bannock tacos in between the sets.

Heads up if you were planning to go on a whim: every ticket tier — general admission, VIP and children's — is listed as sold out. If you already have one, the gates open at 11 a.m. and every ticket sold supports Indigenous youth.

More about Wake the Giant →

Build & Thrive Thunder Bay

Host: Robert Downing

A lot of people decide whether they are walking into your shop long before they ever land on your website — they read the map listing, the reviews, the hours, the photos, and they make the call there. This week's episode is about that stretch of the decision you never see in your analytics, and what a small Thunder Bay business can actually do about it.

In this episode:

🎧 Listen on Spotify →

New episodes every Monday.

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.