Talk:Greater Sudbury

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This article was externally reviewed (March 7, 2007) by Shoutwire. Grade: A++. The author's handle on Shoutwire is bulshoy. See Wikipedia:External peer review/Shoutwire March 2007.

Good work Bearcat, I couldn't have done it better myself :-D. It's nice to see people use my version rather than that other horrid one floating around. -- Earl Andrew - talk 19:07, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Heh, I just copied and pasted it off Hamilton and made the necessary changes. Not all that hard. Bearcat 23:04, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Contents 1 Population figures 2 Radio stations 3 Demographics 4 Possible Things to Add 5 Interesting 6 Gay community and culture 7 Football in Sudbury 8 Climate? 9 New categories 10 History 11 Refrences 12 Demographics 13 Sudbury vs. Greater Sudbury 14 école secondaire macdonald cartier 15 music section

[edit] Population figures

To the person/people who keep editing this article to guess at 2004 or 2005 population figures: Wikipedia should only reflect actual census data, not rough yearly estimates (especially not ones that can't be sourced). Please do not alter the population figure until the 2006 census results are released. Bearcat 23:12, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Radio stations

CHNO called itself "Daryl 103" for exactly one freaking day as a show of support for Canadian Idol competitor Daryl Brunt. It is not to be noted as the station's primary brand name in place of Z103. Bearcat 02:26, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Demographics

The homelessness and food bank figures that were added to the article require a source. Also, regarding the assertion about Ontario Works rates not adequately meeting housing costs, that's a pretty standard Ontario-wide problem. Sudbury is far from unique in that regard; it doesn't merit special mention here. Though, come to think of it, Kimberly Rogers probably does. Bearcat 05:26, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I changed the line about it being the largest city in area in Canada outside quebec. even the link that that line leads to shows that wood buffalo in alberta, and halifax in nova scotia are larger than sudbury.

Wood Buffalo and Halifax are both regional municipalities, not cities. Greater Sudbury is, areawise, the largest municipal entity in English Canada to be designated as a city. Bearcat 06:25, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

A 'regional municipality' is a 'municipal entity' - it's very title, and your use of it show this to be true-this statement: 'it is now the largest city in Ontario, and the largest city in Canada outside of Quebec' is NOT true, at all. Halifax is a city-the mayor attends the meetings of the 'largest cities in canada' ( http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1074865764683_32?s_name=&no_ads= ), and i don't think it is possible to find a map of the country which would not list Halifax as a city. I see what you're trying to say-and I know where you're going with it, but the way you keep stating it in the article is misleading. Perhaps you could discount Wood Buffalo as a city, but I really don't think that you can say that Halifax isn't one.

Perhaps it could be changed to say that Sudbury is the second largest in Canada outside of Quebec? I think this would be more accurate-it's a great entry otherwise by the way-good work. :)

Well, it's not really about how I wrote it; it wasn't originally my addition. Thing is, we really can't let popular understanding trump accuracy; while "regional municipality" and "city" are often effectively the same thing in practice, they're not the same thing in law, and Wikipedia cannot say they are. But I'll try to find a way to rephrase the sentence so that it addresses your concern without actually presenting an inaccurate picture of the situation. Bearcat 00:11, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

I think that's better Bearcat, now that you put in the bit about 'legally designated as a city'. I just think that before there might have been confusion between the legal definition of city, and how it applies here, and the common usage of the word. Good revision. :)

[edit] Possible Things to Add

As a resident of the Valley area, I've heard a few things about our city (Sudbury): -recently CBC radio mentioned Sudbury as being in the top 21 most intelligent cities in the world (has something to with use of technology) - and would it be notable enough to mention our technology sector as an industry (there's that company that's developing the drill that may be used in future space missions to Mars)

Could someone with better knowledge of these things adress them please? I too will try digging up some info. - T. Desloges (6 January 2006)

[edit] Interesting

What an excellent article on Sudbury. Well researched.

However, some information is rather dated in the "communities within the city" area:

- Milnet & Sellwood are ghost towns. As far as I know, nobody lives that far north of the city.

- ditto for "Happy Valley."

All of their articles acknowledge that.

- where's "Nickeldale"? I've lived in Sudbury for 28 yrs and I've never heard of it.

It's the neighbourhood south of Lasalle Blvd between Montrose and the Data Centre: Apollo Terrace, Sunnybrae Ave., etc. It is more commonly grouped within "New Sudbury", but the general consensus on Wikipedia has been that any named community or neighbourhood in a city merits an article. Certainly it's no less valid a listing than Adamsdale.

- Robinson, Lo-Ellen, Lockerby and McFarlane Lake are usually called by their collective name "The South End"

Again, the general consensus on Wikipedia has been that any named community or neighbourhood in a city merits an article.

- where's Milate?

Frankly, I'm not even entirely sure Milate actually exists, but it appears on the map on the CN line east of Creighton, in the former town of Walden. Doesn't even have road access. I can neither vouch for it nor find any references to figure out what the hell it is, but it's mapped and was added here by someone else.

Also, the Greater Sudbury airport now has non-stop flights to Varadaro, Cuba.

I'll add that.

Other than that, awesome article. I was very surprised at the amount of detail.

Glad you appreciate. Bearcat 22:21, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

--> Has anyone ever considered adding "Average Household Income" to the demographics section? I know that this is commonly listed in that catagory on many other Canadian cities. Just something me and my wife have always wondered. Census data should be a good source for this data.

[edit] Gay community and culture

Until Zig's gets its own wikipedia article, I feel that this information isn't necessary in an article for Sudbury.

I like the idea of including information about things like gay sporting leagues, teams or organizations however, regarding the hockey league statement, the reference doesn't mention anything about the hockey league being gay or that members are part of the gay community. I've contacted someone currently in charge of Sudbury’s pride festivities to provide more insight.

I should mention that I'm the one who had originally included this information in the article so if anyone disagrees with me you can go ahead and put it back in.

Here's the piece I removed:

In their 8 years of business, Zig's has raised approximately $10,000 in various fundraisers for the gay community, as well as sponsoring a women's hockey league with a number of teams throughout Northern Ontario. The bar offers a sitting room, a dance floor, pool tables, and a pinball machine. They play mostly upbeat dance music and host a weekly karaoke night.^[1] Pdelongchamp 16:38, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

The gay community and culture info is neither distinctive or relevant. Could it be better positioned under articles for à la Gay Ontario or Gay Canada, while leaving behind a "See XXX" sentence? CJ Withers 20:39, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

I dunno...I think it's perfectly valid for this article to note that Sudbury has both the only gay bar and the only gay pride parade in the entire Northern Ontario region. A "Gay Ontario" or "Gay Canada" article could really only be a basic overview; if such an article were to actually list every individual gay bar in every Canadian city, it would be entirely too long and detailed to actually be very useful. Though I personally think it's fine, I wouldn't necessarily object to shortening the section either, but I think at least one sentence noting that it's the only city in the region with a gay bar and a Pride parade is perfectly valid. Bearcat 23:01, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Football in Sudbury

I've added a tiny paragraph about football in Sudbury. I thought it should be mentioned. Albertkoholic 05:43, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Climate?

in response to this, we dont want to scare people away... :)Anung Mwka 23:47, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

That's not really the issue; climate is a regional thing and individual cities rarely, if ever, have their own individual microclimates separately from the larger climactic region they're a part of. It's just a typical Central/Northern Ontario (warm summers, cold winters) climate with some urban heat island effects. Bearcat 22:24, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

I just added a Climate Section, stuck it in the middle before Notables, I had no clue where to put it. It contains Temperature and Precipitation Data. Yes, I know the data doesnt add up in some areas, but dont change it, as that is official. All data came from Environment Canada, and I put a direct link to that weather section under External Links called "Full Weather Data". Enjoy... Anung Mwka 01:59, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Also, because the data is only valid up to 2000 for the Record Highs and Lows and all other records, the records area is not 100% accurate so I dont see the point in adding that. ie, I know for a fact Sudbury set the highest record October temperature in 2005. Anung Mwka 02:03, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] New categories

I thought educaiton and healthcare warranted their own categories, instead of being part of education & culture. Moved demographics up to below the geography - thought they should go together. Also added a small section on emergency services. Blotto adrift 04:04, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] History

This bit was recently added to the history section:

"The city's economic growth has also been hindered at times by taxation issues: because of federal corporate taxation rules pertaining to natural resources companies, Sudbury is one of the largest cities in Canada that does not have the power to directly levy municipal taxes on its own largest employers, a fact which has sometimes left the city without a sufficient tax base to adequately maintain or improve municipal services. "

Is this accurate? My understanding that is that the municipality can levy property taxes on the surface buildings of mining operations, but not the underground facilities. Consequently, INCO & Falconbridge (whose new names escape me at the moment) have been moving more & more things underground. Corporate taxes and other taxes are definitely out of reach of the city. Blotto adrift 03:30, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't see how that's necessarily incompatible with the statement at hand, but I've rephrased it to be clearer nonetheless. Bearcat 03:37, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I thought it incompatible because of the "does not have the power to directly levy municipal taxes" part. They do have the power to do that, but the new wording is fine. Wording or not, there's no question that the City does need access to new revenue sources. There was some sort of ruling a couple of years back to the effect that INCO was overcharged on property taxes over several years. INCO didn't make the City pay them back, but it did make a dent in subsequent revenue. Blotto adrift 03:56, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I have to admit that I phrased that part badly. I didn't think that's what I'd written, because what I meant to say was something closer to your point...but it came out wrong and I didn't realize that because I was seeing what I meant to say rather than what I actually said. Duh. Bearcat 04:28, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Refrences

I have started to convert the in-line-links to refrences (just adding the <ref></ref> to them). I will be back to put in proper citations to the respective websites.--Kelapstick 19:16, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Demographics

I removed a statement "much of the remaining population is bilingual", the wording (and the source) is flawed. It suggested that ~62% of the population only spoke English, and ~28% only spoke French, much of the remaining were bilingual (about 2000). There are far more than 2000 bilingual people in Sudbury. Also the table in the section is flawed too, it shows 49% being of Canadian origin, 39% being of French origin, and 20% being of English origin. I know it isn't the case but it looks like one of two things:

1. 49% is Native Canadian, 39% are French Canadian, 20% are English Canadian
2. 49% were born in Canada, 39% are immigrants who were born in France, 20% are immigrants who were born in England

I find the table confusing and don't think it really shows any good information. Suggestions, alternative sources for demographics that might make more sense?--Kelapstick 21:02, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sudbury vs. Greater Sudbury

I don't have really strong feelings about this, but thought I would put it out there. Since the Cities of Sudbury and Greater Sudbury are separate entities, should there be a separate article for Sudbury as a "community" of Greater Sudbury? This article would consist mainly of the history old city - most of the remainder could remain where it is. I know that to most people it's still Sudbury regardless of the new name, but it seems to do a bit of a disservice to the other towns in the old region when most of the history of the amalgamated city is that of the old city - and the histories of the old towns are under those articles. The same would apply, I suppose, to Greater Napanee. Thoughts? Blotto adrift 23:25, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

The two main problems I foresee with this are (a) separating the history cleanly, and (b) the fact that a lot of people would simply continue to link to the former Sudbury's article as if nothing had changed. As it is, there's already a constant need to clean up after people who don't understand what the amalgamation implies, a constant need to clean up after people who write as if Sudbury was still a separate political entity which things like Lively, Hanmer, the Sudbury Airport, Lake Wanapitei and Sudbury Downs are near but not in. For example, just a few days ago I cleaned up a round of "near Sudbury" edits to an article on something in the city, and I already had to go in and clean up a whole new round of the very same inaccuracy in the very same article again today. (And I double-checked the history — I didn't miss anything last time. These were new bad edits added by a different user after my last fixup.)

In a nutshell, I'm not particularly fond of the idea of making it easier for people to make false or inaccurate contributions to Wikipedia, and harder for the rest of us to clean up the crap, than it already is. Unless you're actually volunteering to keep a constant watch on the old city's article to make sure that people aren't linking to it when they should be linking here instead, I think it would be best to leave well enough alone — IMO, we should really focus our efforts on improving the neighbourhood articles (Falconbridge, Garson, Copper Cliff, Flour Mill, Val Caron, Donovan, etc.) rather than overemphasizing arbitrary municipal divisions that people were never really all that attached to until after they were gone. In fact, I'm almost convinced that we should actually go the other way, and merge the histories (which are all basically boilerplate permastubs with virtually no possibility of any real expansion) of the former municipalities into this article, or into Regional Municipality of Sudbury, instead.

When I lived in Sudbury, nobody ever said they were from Rayside-Balfour or Walden — when specificity wasn't necessary, they just said Sudbury, and when it was, they said Chelmsford or Azilda or Lively. The municipalities were just meaningless lines on a map which people more or less ignored. Now people care about Walden or Rayside-Balfour or Valley East, but when they actually existed, they meant about as much to people as the distinction between Toronto and East York, Ottawa and Vanier or Kitchener and Waterloo. Don't know what you got 'til it's gone, eh? Bearcat 03:54, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

After some thought, I decided to go the other way instead; since almost all of the Val Caron/Lively/Chelmsford-level articles were short permastubs, I opted instead to redirect those to the pre-2001 municipalities, so that instead of 40 or 50 five-line stubs, we now have six longer articles that should hopefully be a lot easier to develop and improve. Many of them already look like much better and more detailed articles just from the cutting and pasting and redirecting, in fact — even with the relatively limited content that they still have right now, having it compiled into one article instead of spread out over seven or eight makes a big difference. That said, I still don't think there's any easy way to separate an "Old Sudbury" article from this one without dragging this one back down to stub quality in the process. Bearcat (talk) 10:33, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Looks great. Saw your work earlier with the Regional Municipality article and thought it looked good, but I like this even better. If an article on Sudbury were separated, it could still be fairly substantial with the pre-amalgamation history alone, but I see your earlier usability / findability point. For that matter, there's probably enough material out there for a whole separate history of Sudbury article. Like I said, I don't have strong feelings about the idea. It's too bad they didn't just name the new city "Sudbury," since that's what everyone calls it anyway.

A question - given this new format, what do you think is the best way to add info on the old old pre-1973 municipalities like Waters and Neelon, or, going back further, McKim? Some had the same names as the communities (Hanmer, Dowling), so I guess some mention could go in those articles. Trouble is, any article would likely be a permastub - dates and maybe the origin of the name. Still, the information is useful - genealogists and others sometimes have reason to try to track down names of old municipalities. I guess articles on geographic townships is a possibility. I've done a few, but I've also seen basic township lists/summaries in articles on old counties that no longer exist (Kent, Ontario). In those cases though, there is usually 100+ years of history instead of the quarter-century of Rayside and Nickel Centre. Blotto adrift (talk) 20:29, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I'm really starting to move away from the "stub article" approach to topics, particularly if they're actually subtopics of other topics which also have stub articles. What I've actually started doing for most smaller municipalities in Ontario (including Markstay-Warren, French River and St. Charles) is that if the municipality's main article and the smaller communities' articles are all stubs, then I redirect and merge the smaller communities back into the municipality's article in order to expand that. They can always be spun back out again at a later date when the main article is long enough, but in the meantime it's better to have the information all in one place than to make the reader click back and forth between five or six different stubs that really don't say anything more than "Stinson is a community in the town of Markstay-Warren." So for old geographic townships, in most cases I'd probably just redirect them to the appropriate municipality, where they can be expanded upon in the history section.

Yeah, the whole "Greater" thing is kind of stupid — I can understand why some people wanted it, but it is pretty pointless, poorly understood (there used to be an anon editor who repeatedly edited the infobox on this article to read "Greater Sudbury Area", as if this were analogous to Greater Toronto Area rather than Greater Napanee), and doesn't get used much. And don't even get me started on people who say "Greater City of Sudbury" instead!

But at any rate, I think I might have hit upon a potential solution to balance your idea against the naming problem. Instead of splitting out a separate article on the whole old city, how about spinning off the pre-2001 history section of this article into a new History of Sudbury, Ontario piece, and this article could then contain just the stuff about the amalgamated city? It would enable us to put your proposal into practice, while still leaving the actual title Sudbury, Ontario as a redirect to this article instead of a misleading target for incorrect links. You seem to have already been leaning in that direction in your comment, and I've just confirmed that several other Canadian cities have already done that very thing (e.g. History of Toronto, History of Vancouver, History of Quebec City.) So let's go for it — god knows there's a lot more that can be said about the city's history. (And while we're at it, Sudbury Strike of 1978 could use some expansion — it's a pretty major piece of Canadian labour history, and yet I haven't been able to find all that much information on the web.) Bearcat (talk) 22:19, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Sounds good. Blotto adrift 23:31, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] école secondaire macdonald cartier

i added a paragraph under theater for ESMC because there was nothing there even though the school's theater program has seen a lot of great actors/writers go through it, and is consistently representing the city well at out of town fetivals. I was a member of the theater group, and something like, 18 times out of the past 20 years, macdonald-cartier has ben provincially recognized, and I don't think other schools can say the same. I don't have a source for that so I didn't write that specifically, but I'm working on finding a source.

I dunno, I felt it would be important to mention a school that is consistently pumping out amazing cultural material for franco-ontarians, if you include all of the alumni. Swiffer (talk) 07:50, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Additions are welcomed. Please provide a source or external link to verify your edits. Flibirigit (talk) 14:33, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] music section

I was just wondering if it would be ok to do a little write up of the sudbury underground music scene? I'm a member of the scene and a lot of bands from the city have had a lot of success in the canadian scene, some bands even being signed to labels in europe. Just a suggestion?Swiffer (talk) 07:53, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Additions are welcomed. Please provide a source or external link to verify your edits. Flibirigit (talk) 14:33, 17 February 2008 (UTC)