A hundred years ago, Cobalt, Ontario, was a spectacular, if serendipitous, success. Its rich silver deposits funded theatres, opera houses, countless saloons, an electric streetcar, a stock exchange and the national Silver Kings hockey team of the early NHL. As a world mecca for fortune seekers, the town secured the first detachment of Ontario’s Provincial Police. Its silver helped finance the Empire’s First World War expenditures. A post-war visit to Cobalt was a must for the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII.
Today’s Cobalt is a community that would prefer to prosper again by doing what made it famous, but carries on chasing publicly funded tributes to its past. It participates aggressively in what Pamela Stern and Peter V. Hall call the “proposal economy,” a broad term for today’s management of community boosterism, which allows dying towns or regions to fight on by...
Les Horswill writes on politics and public policy. He has worked as an organizer, speechwriter and policy advisor. As assistant deputy minister, he advised various Ontario governments on national unity, energy and trade.
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