Thunder Bay, Ont., community partners release welcome guide for the city's newcomers

Sarah Law · CBC News

· Posted: Aug 25, 2026 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: August 25

The Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission (CEDC) has released its first-ever welcome guide for newcomers, as community partners look to attract and retain more skilled workers in the city. 

“Welcome Home: A Guide to Thunder Bay Living,” released on Monday, provides information on city services, health-care options, education, employment and recreation opportunities in town. 

It was inspired by the Welcoming Communities Analysis completed earlier this year by the city, CEDC and Thunder Bay Multicultural Association (TBMA).

“We thought a guide would be useful, especially as we're working with employers,” said Jamie Taylor, the CEDC’s chief executive officer.

“We always had a request for information that they could use to help when they're attracting employees to Thunder Bay, but also when they had employees that were coming in and were looking for that type of information.”

The guide, which is available online and in print through the CEDC, includes four key sections:

• Thunder Bay overview.
• City and services.
• Shopping.
• Art and culture.

“It's a balance of both providing the social things as well as the practical things,” Taylor said.

Thunder Bay’s outgoing mayor Ken Boshcoff said the guide is an important tool to help highlight the city’s amenities and why people should consider moving there.

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“We need to grow because there's so many job opportunities here now that we actually need people with talent who will enjoy the lifestyle — and the fact that you only have to drive 20 minutes to the airport,” Boshcoff said.

“It's still one of the best places in the country to raise a family.”

Feedback from newcomers

Tej Shah, local immigration partnership co-ordinator at the TBMA, said the association helped facilitate focus groups to help inform the guide’s major themes.

Newcomers including international students, work permit holders and refugees shared their experiences of when they first settled in the city.

Among the key challenges they faced were figuring out public transit, learning about municipal services and where they needed to go for help, he explained.

“We saw a lot of value in a guide like this that is almost like a one-stop shop to find all [the] information about Thunder Bay,” Shah said.

“We are hoping that this ultimately helps in terms of making newcomers feel that they can belong in Thunder Bay and they can call Thunder Bay home — and if there are any gaps, that they can reach out to relevant partner organizations and let us know.”

Navigating ‘negative publicity’ 

While navigating any new city can be difficult, Thunder Bay itself faces a number of challenges.

City council declared homelessness as a humanitarian crisis back in February, and the district continues to see the highest opioid-related death rate in the province.

According to Statistics Canada, the city also has the highest homicide rate per capita in the country, and also had the highest average annual human trafficking rate in Canada between 2014 and 2024.

That said, in Boshcoff’s view, it’s important to take statistics with a grain of salt.

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“Almost every city is enduring the same kind of negative publicity that we are,” he said. “We take it kind of on the chin more than anybody but the numbers don't really bear out.

“Are we doing things about it? Yeah, we're still working at it,” he said, adding that community organizations are working together to provide social services and programming to address the issues at hand.