18 Business View Magazine - April 2016
St. Catharines, Ontario
Riding a crest of innovation
“St. Catharines is a 21st century city that is poised to
be one of the great cities in North America!” Or so de-
clares its Mayor, Walter Sendzik. It’s a bold statement,
and one that invites scrutiny. But, when one does see
what this city, situated where the Niagara River flows
into Lake Ontario, has done in redefining and reinvigo-
rating itself for the new century after a period of rela-
tive decline, it would be difficult to argue with Mayor
Sendzik’s perspective. St. Catharines is, indeed, “a
city that’s on the move.”
St. Catharines, Ontario has always been known as
“The Garden City” due to its many acres of parks, gar-
dens, and trails. But the city has always been an im-
portant regional center for heavy manufacturing, as
well - after all, its official motto is “Industry and Liber-
ality.” But times have changed for this municipality of
some 130,000. “We had a very robust manufacturing
sector that was driven by low energy costs for the bet-
ter part of the last hundred years,” recounts Sendzik.
“But the bottom started to fall out in the 1980s. By the
early ‘90s, most of the larger businesses in manufac-
turing were gone. We had GM (General Motors). And at
one point, we had over 12,000 GM employees in our
