City council may lodge a formal complaint after an immigrant consulting firm suggested new Canadians may want to avoid Flin Flon.
On its website, Immigroup ranks Flin Flon second on a list titled “More Dying Towns Smart Immigrants Should Avoid. Or Should They?”.
“Like most places on this list, Flin Flon was once a booming mining town, which explains why it once had a population of over 10,000 people,” reads the article, which has been making the rounds on Facebook in recent weeks. “But it's [sic] population has almost halved since then in part because it's [sic] location just over half way up the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border from the US is really isolated.”
Riley Haas, the website manager for Immigroup and author of the article, said he based the list strictly on Statistics Canada data on population loss over the past few decades.
“Flin Flon is number 2 on the list because of its large population decline between 1961 and 2011,” Haas told The Reminder.
Haas agreed there could be many other communities that saw even sharper population drops than those on his list, but they were not part of the Statistics Canada data he reviewed.
“That could be because these towns you are thinking of are included in other census areas or are too small to have been included in our list,” he said.
Annoyed
The article annoyed Coun. Bill Hanson, who followed a link to it on Facebook.
“I think that this guy got it completely backwards,” said Hanson.
“It’s kind of goofy and it’s almost irresponsible journalism, in my mind.”
Hanson suggested criteria for such a list should include factors such as happiness, crime rate and housing prices.
Asked whether the list might deter immigrants from moving to Flin Flon, Hanson said “it very well could.”
He said he wondered whether council should lodge a formal complaint with the website “given the narrow parameters” of the list.
While Hanson agreed there’s no stopping the freedom of the online press, he said he would discuss with council the possibility of a complaint.
“Maybe I’ll start bombarding their website with pictures of Flin Flon and the good things happening [here],” he added.
Hanson said he knows immigrants who have fallen in love with Flin Flon and its friendly, safe atmosphere.
“I think that the immigrants we have in Flin Flon are just people who want to earn a good living, make enough money to send their kids to school, have a good life, be able to he happy with their family,” he said.
Just as Immigroup’s list bothered Hanson, so too did a comment recently posted beneath the article by someone with the handle “pixelperfect.”
“Flin Flon MB totally deserves to be on this list,” read the comment. “My partner’s family is from there, and while they are nice people, a lot of the residents of this dying town are the most racist and bigoted, especially to immigrants. They are islamophobic as all ages out. Why would I want to raise my family here? Why would I subject my future children to the harsh, racial slurs of a filthy drunk slob? If they would teach some actual tolerance to these miners, their town wouldn't be in jeopardy.”
Unfair
Hanson called the comment unfair and said only a “small, small minority” of residents are bigoted.
When The Reminder asked why the anonymous comment was allowed to stay on the site, Haas said Immigroup tries to remove as few comments as possible.
“If someone is insulting a specific someone personally, or being racist or sexist, we may take action,” he said. “Otherwise, we tend to leave the comments.”
Haas’s article was posted on the site in August 2014 but has only recently been discovered by many area residents.
Another northern Manitoba community, Thompson, ranked sixth on the list.
Also included are Wabana (1), Placentia (5) and Channel-Port Aux Basques (8) in Newfoundland and Labrador, Springhill (3) and Cape Breton (10) in Nova Scotia, Kapuskasing (4) and Elliot Lake (7) in Ontario, and Kitimat in BC (9).
The Toronto-based Immigroup describes itself as a provider of “friendly, accessible, understandable legal service of the highest quality for matters concerning immigration and travel.”
CUTLINES
Left: Flin Flon ranks second on Immigroup’s online list. Right: Riley Haas said Flin Flon’s ranking was based solely on population decline over the decades.
Immigroup photos
Coun. Bill Hanson worries the article could deter immigrants from moving to Flin Flon.
File Photo
