Vol.55, No.1 - Spring 2025
Hamilton has the largest harbour on Lake Ontario and it generates thousands of large trucks rolling along the highways of the Golden Horseshoe.
Larissa Fenn is looking to greatly reduce those trips by expanding the harbour. She sits on the harbour’s board of directors and is supervising its expansion throughout Ontario.
Fenn is vice-president of corporate affairs with HOPA, the new administration for Hamilton harbour that now includes Oshawa harbour, the smallest industrial port on Lake Ontario. And HOPA (Hamilton Oshawa Port Authority) is now operating a new harbour on the Welland Canal by repurposing an abandoned pulp and paper mill. More than 3,000 ships sail past the site each year.
In Oshawa, HOPA spent $35 million to create a new grain handling silo to fill Great Lakes freighters and that will take 14,000 trucks off the highways in Metro Toronto.
Grain farmers in Durham Region and east of Toronto used to truck their grain to Hamilton to be shipped around the world.
The Oshawa grain elevator was built on a new dock designed to accommodate the largest ships on the Great Lakes.
And the pier facilities in Thorold on the Welland Canal will absorb truck loads of cargo produced in the Niagara Region which traditionally was trucked to Hamilton Harbour.
HOPA established the Thorold site in partnership with MBI, a Dutch firm that repurposes abandoned brownfield sites.
The 500-acre Thorold site was the home of Ontario Pulp and Paper Company that produced newsprint for the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News using timber brought by ship from the north shore of the St. Lawrence River near Baie Comeau. The rolls of newsprint produced there were sent to Chicago and New York by ship.
“Transportation by water is the cheapest and most efficient way of moving bulk cargo and many industries are looking for that advantage by locating on navigable water,” said Fenn.
Canada’s largest sugar refinery will open this year in Hamilton Harbour. Sucro Can is spending $135 million to produce the refinery at the foot of Sherman St. N. where it connects with Hamilton Harbour.
The refinery will produce 1 million tonnes a year of refined sugar used mostly by the food processing industry. Ships bringing raw sugar to the refinery will tie up against Randall Reef, a unique structure in the southeast corner of Hamilton Harbour built to contain contaminated soil and debris dredged off the harbour floor.
It had been one of the most contaminated sites on the Great Lakes with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).. These carcinogenic toxins were deposited in the harbour over the last century by the heavy industries lining the harbour, such as steel mills.
Stelco was a major contributor to the $138.9 million cost of building and filling Randal Reef with contamination.
BMI Group, HOPA’s partner on the new Welland Canal harbour, recently sold a brownfield site in Port Colborne on the Welland Canal to the Japanese firm Asahi Kasei to build a $1.6 billion plant to manufacture separators for the lithium-ion batteries Honda will use in its new electric cars, assembled in Alliston.
Construction has already begun on the plant which is expected to employ 300 people. Plant construction will create 500 jobs.
Niagara College is expanding onto HOPA’s Multimodal Hub in Thorold to conduct trade courses related to transportation.
The hub has railway and highway connections as well as the waters of the Welland Canal.
The new sugar refinery in Hamilton is expected to bring an additional $1 billion in industry growth to the harbour. Its refined sugar is used by the agri-food industry which now accounts for 31 per cent of all cargo handled by HOPA in Hamilton.