F*ck Little Amik: 5 ways council can make Fort Frances stop sucking

The 2026 municipal election is upon us, and with it comes the proverbial barrage of buzzwords and virtue-signalling from incumbents and newcomers looking for your support.

Candidates can’t really be faulted for sloganeering and looking for a mob to lead. That's part of the game. And some have gone further with videos expanding on their thoughts, although generally on narrow, reactionary hot-button issues like roundabouts.

But apply even momentary scrutiny and most of these campaigns are coasting on good vibes and demographic tribalism. The Facebook pledges of community engagement will be deleted the day after the election. The lawn signs woo voters with ‘attaboy’ values and nostalgia instead of strategy, specifics or substance.

Indeed, there’s nary a plan behind the platitudes — nor much of a record in some incumbent cases. (Can anyone name three accomplishments of council from the past four years? The wide use of AI-generated campaign ads is noteworthy in this context.)

While the names on the ballot are set for October, all is not lost. The fortunes of ‘the Fort’ are hampered not by a lack of lofty ambitions, or even by the values of those on the ballot. The problem is the failure by candidates to plot an actionable course that recognizes the stumbling blocks and missing economic enablers holding us back.

We suffer from these bottlenecks.

We want employers to create jobs, but the people they hire can’t find anywhere to live. If they find somewhere to live and can afford it, they can’t find childcare. If they clear both hurdles, they discover we have no public transit. When they finally get here, they're promised access to nature, only to discover that much of it is the preserve of entrenched locals, inaccessible without property, equipment or connections.

My thesis is that this place needs to stop sucking, and that it can do so by getting out of its own way: stop pulling in different directions without first establishing a foundation to address the community’s shortcomings. Restore some of the municipality’s most critical economic building blocks instead of waiting for a new industry saviour.

And so, gentle reader, here are five specific (and somewhat unvarnished) takes on what the next council can actually do, that none of the hopefuls are talking about seriously:

1. Build rental housing. Start now.

Talk to almost any employer in Fort Frances — public or private — and eventually the conversation comes around to the same problem: housing.

You can recruit someone. You can offer them an incredible opportunity with excellent remuneration. You can convince them to take the job. You can even convince them that moving to Northwestern Ontario might be an adventure.

Then they start looking for an apartment. And everything falls apart.

Housing isn't just social policy anymore. It is economic infrastructure. If employers can't recruit workers because those workers can't find somewhere to live, Fort Frances has an economic development and workforce sustainability crisis.

Waiting for the private market to solve it hasn't worked. Construction costs are high and volatile in the current trade environment. Financing is expensive. Future rents don't necessarily support the cost of new construction or yield returns quickly enough. A developer looking at the economics of purpose-built rental housing in Fort Frances may quite rationally put their money somewhere else.

It’s a circular problem: we don't have enough workers partly because we don't have enough housing, while building housing itself is more expensive because we don't have enough workers.

But the municipality has a different calculus than other investors.

It doesn't need a developer's return. It needs a return in human capital: taxpayers, nurses, tradespeople, professionals, young families and people spending money in local businesses. More rental stock also relieves pressure on the market and frees existing housing stock for other residents.

And this doesn't have to be some 20-year stretch goal.

Consider one obvious property: the Nugget. It's centrally located and close to services. Instead of watching it continue to deteriorate into a troublesome eyesore, the municipality should investigate acquiring it — voluntarily if possible, and through expropriation if necessary and legally justified — and converting it into decent rental housing. Renovate the existing units as purpose-built rentals aimed at workers new to the community. Use the balance of the property for a second phase with a broader mix of units. Downtown Kenora is home to a similar project right now.

Every unit counts. The stagnant former Sixth Street School property should also be on the list for expropriation, for similar reasons. Put 20, 30 or 40 new rentals into the centre of town and suddenly dozens more people can say “yes” when a Fort Frances employer offers them a job.

Rather than wait for our economic development officers and politicians to kiss the right frog, the municipality needs to create the conditions for employers to fill the demand for workers they have now.

2. Treat childcare like economic infrastructure too.

Suppose our hypothetical new resident gets the job.

Suppose, miraculously, they find an apartment.

Then comes the next question: What about my kids?

Childcare shortages aren't merely inconvenient for parents. They remove people from the workforce.

Newcomers face an additional disadvantage: they often don't have grandparents, siblings, neighbours, or lifelong friends nearby who can fill the gaps. That's a form of invisible infrastructure many lifelong residents don't even realize they have.

Every childcare space enables someone to work. Twenty spaces can mean twenty more people available for full-time jobs. Fifty spaces can materially alter the labour market of a community our size.

Yet economic development at the Town of Fort Frances remains overwhelmingly focused on attracting businesses and industry rather than making it possible for actual human beings to work for them.

Childcare gets written off by council as the domain of the District of Rainy River Services Board. Jurisdictionally, fine. Economically, that's shortsighted.

The municipality has an obvious stake in bringing together employers, school boards, faith communities, and other organizations to identify space, resources, training incentives and creative ways to fill gaps — particularly after-school and non-standard-hours care.

If Fort Frances is serious about attracting young families, childcare capacity needs to be an economic development priority.

If we want to attract and keep young families, we need to give them somewhere to live and somewhere safe for their children to go while they work.

3. Stop fucking around about being the gateway to Rainy Lake.

This one may hurt some feelings.

For as long as I can remember, Fort Frances has thumped its chest about being the gateway to Rainy Lake recreation. Today, that's a grift bordering on marketing malpractice, right next to advertisements for magic beans.

It's a calcified delusion about what it means to live here. The myth persists because the people repeating it often experience a completely different Rainy Lake than everyone else. If you own waterfront property, have a cabin, own a boat, know where to launch, know where to park, know where to swim and have spent your life navigating the informal networks of people similarly privileged, Rainy Lake is wonderfully accessible. But we don’t need to sell that experience to those people.

It's farcical to assume that experience is available to a newcomer or visitor. Where is the waterfront destination where someone can rent a kayak, buy lunch, swim, sit on a patio, launch a paddleboard, take their kids to the beach or spend an afternoon beside the lake? Where is the public place that tells someone arriving in Fort Frances: this is Rainy Lake, and it's for you too?

We cannot market ourselves as a lakefront recreational community when meaningful access to the lake depends largely on private property, private boats, inherited know-how and connections to the right people.

There's the reality check. If this is the identity Fort Frances wants to sell, then stop playing footsy with boomer nostalgia and deliver the product. Fuck this Little Amik reincarnation. Where is the beach?

Here again, fortunately, we already have a starting point: Sunny Cove Camp, the only municipally owned property on Rainy Lake.

(As an aside, it is breathtaking that a majority of the current council pissed away millions of dollars on misguided Point Park litigation, lost in court, and then immediately moved to sell the only other municipal beach. Keep that in mind when evaluating the incumbents next month.)

The next council needs to stop treating Sunny Cove as a relic preserved in amber for the Kiwanis Club of 1970 and develop it for families today.

Give it a great public beach. Food and beverage service. Canoe and kayak rentals. Trails. Events. Weddings. Summer programming. Children's activities. Maybe cabins or other overnight accommodation where appropriate. Make it somewhere residents actually want to spend a Saturday — and somewhere visitors have a reason to discover.

And, critically, make it accessible to people who don’t already own $200,000 worth of recreational property and toys.

Rainy Lake should be one of Fort Frances’ greatest competitive advantages. Let’s start acting like it instead of selling a value proposition that is only achievable for third generation cabin owners.

4. Get a bus.

Let's check in again on our hypothetical employer.

She's recruited the worker. They found an apartment. Childcare isn't an issue.

There's just one problem: they don't own a car.

In most cities, that's an inconvenience. In Fort Frances, it can make the entire proposition unworkable.

We've designed daily life around the assumption that every adult owns or has access to a private automobile. That assumption makes increasingly little sense if we're trying to recruit young professionals, newcomers, entry-level workers, international recruits, students or anyone arriving from a larger centre where car ownership is optional.

(In another case of truth being stranger than fiction, council has actually recognized the need for transit investment — in its own Bizarro World way. Instead of investing in transit for people who live here, pay taxes here, or who we need to move here, council committed half a million dollars of taxpayer money to subsidize a private airline offering supposedly more “affordable” flights into Fort Frances. The flights connect only to Thunder Bay, operate on a less-than-ideal schedule and remain exorbitantly priced for most travellers. Council records show no evidence that staff consulted airline-industry advisors. Keep that in mind at the ballot box too.)

Now imagine if council had put those resources into moving people around Fort Frances.

Start with one bus. Run a sensible loop connecting the west end, downtown, major employers, healthcare, shopping and residential areas. Seven days a week. Early enough for the morning shift. Late enough for the evening shift. Make the schedule so simple you barely need to check it. ChatGPT could probably optimize the route in five minutes.

Transit isn't just a big-city amenity. It's labour-market infrastructure. Employers will tell you this.

If someone is willing to move hundreds or thousands of kilometres to work here, perhaps our contribution could be ensuring they can travel the last three kilometres to their job. Instead, we're bankrolling an airline for big-industry and government travellers who were coming here anyway.

5. Make Fort Frances look like somewhere people want to live.

This one is less about removing a bottleneck and more about acknowledging something municipal government rarely seems willing to say out loud:

Fort Frances isn't winning any beauty contests. Not even compared to other small cities in the region, or right next door in Minnesota.

That would be less remarkable if almost everything surrounding us weren't so beautiful. We live amid forests, lakes, rapids, islands, rich agricultural land, and exposed rock, with an international river at our doorstep. Drive ten minutes in almost any direction and Northwestern Ontario does the landscaping for us.

Then drive back into town. Somehow, the aesthetic we've cultivated inside the municipality is brutalist and gauche: municipal buildings floating in asphalt, tired boulevards, empty lots and regimented rows of petunias outside the Civic Centre that look lifted from a Better Homes & Gardens spread in 1987. And a rusted-out mermaid sculpture (I think?).

There is little contemporary landscape architecture. Little greenery. Little use of native grasses, trees, stone, timber, or other materials that actually evoke the place where we live. Little thought given to shade, gathering spaces, pedestrian corridors, or how one public space connects to another.

The removal of trees downtown — compounded by council's endorsement of municipal staff's lazy tree-canopy policy — has made matters worse.

Successful communities understand that public space isn't decoration. It's infrastructure.

So start with the riverfront. For the first time in more than a century, demolition of the paper mill has opened an enormous amount of land along the Rainy River. It offers a generational opportunity to give the river back to the people after decades of sacrificing it for industry barons.

Imagine a continuous, landscaped walking and cycling corridor along the waterfront: trees, native plantings, lookouts, gathering spaces, public art, patios and connections into downtown and surrounding neighbourhoods.

Instead, we content ourselves with periodic concept drawings from Resolute's scrap dealers at BMI Group while council offers no coherent public vision for active transportation or for extending the existing La Verendrye Parkway into something that gives someone who isn't an incontinent goose a reason to stop.

Likewise, visitors to the community need an invitation to stop here – so make it easy for them to do so. Remove friction from the choice to park a vehicle and explore. The experience should starts with our downtown.

Every year, thousands of people enter Canada right into the heart of the community. But they pass through, instead entering a scavenger hunt to find the LCBO and the Beer Store, which are both log-jammed into the most hidden corners of the community.

Why isn’t there a municipally-owned commercial plaza at the vacant corner of Church and Mowat that offers boat parking, beer and liquor, outdoor licenses, and a reason to explore downtown? This would provide the anchor retail that can bring visitors into the community.

This is an exercise in placemaking for the municipality – creating the conditions for people to know they have arrived somewhere special and should take a beat to see what it has to offer.

The old-think the next council has to disabuse is that beautification, landscape, user experience, and discoverability are tools for the economic development – not a consequence that follows a community’s success.

Final thoughts

None of these ideas is particularly glamorous. There is no magic industry coming to save us. There is no consultant who will discover that Fort Frances’ problem was an insufficiently compelling slogan. Or a prettier "welcome" sign.

Our problems are considerably more practical: People need homes. Parents need childcare. Residents need transportation. A community that has built an identity on Rainy Lake needs actual access to all it has to offer.

That’s the agenda we need to hear candidates talking about in this municipal election. Not whether Fort Frances has “tremendous potential” or the lawn sign wars about which incumbent can bring us more integrity (pfft).

The question for everyone on the ballot is a practical one: are you prepared to do the unglamorous work required to help this community get its shit together? Or should we all hit the snooze button for another four years?

-Douglas W. Judson