| elevation_footnotes = <!--for references: use tags-->
| elevation_m = 347.5
| postal_code_type = Forward sortation area
| postal_code = P3A to P3G, P3L, P3N, P3P, P3Y
| area_codes = 705, 249, and 683
| blank_name = Highways
| blank_info = <br /><br /><br />
| blank2_name =
| blank2_info =
| blank_name_sec2 = GDP (Greater Sudbury )
| blank_info_sec2 = CA$9.7 billion (2020)
| blank1_name_sec2 = GDP per capita (Greater Sudbury )
| blank1_info_sec2 = 54,491 (2016)
| website =
Greater Sudbury (), also known as Sudbury, is the most populous city in Northern Ontario with a population around 166,004 in 2021. Greater Sudbury is the only single-tier municipality in Northern Ontario, the largest city in Ontario by area and the fifth largest in Canada. The city is separate from, but entirely surrounded by, the Sudbury District.
The Sudbury region was inhabited by the Ojibwe people of the Algonquin group of the Anishinaabe prior to the founding of Sudbury after the discovery of nickel and copper ore in 1883 during the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Greater Sudbury was formed in 2001 by merging the cities and towns of the former Regional Municipality of Sudbury with several previously unincorporated townships. Being located inland, the local climate is extremely seasonal, with average January lows of around and average July highs of .
The city's official name was changed to Greater Sudbury in 2001, when it was amalgamated with its suburban towns into the current city, on the grounds of ensuring that the merger did not erase the longstanding community identities of the outlying towns. In everyday usage, however, the city is still more commonly referred to as just Sudbury.
History
<!-- -->
The original name for the region was N'Swakamok, which translates to 'where the three roads meet' in the Ojibwe language. The Sudbury region was home to by Ojibwe people, an Anishinaabeg group, as early as 9,000 years ago following the retreat of the last continental ice sheet.
In 1850, local Ojibwe chiefs entered into an agreement with the British Crown to share a large tract of land, including what is now Sudbury, as part of the Robinson Huron Treaty. In exchange the Crown pledged to pay an annuity to First Nations people, which was originally set at $1.60 per treaty member and increased incrementally; its last increase was in 1874, leaving it fixed at $4.
French Jesuits were the first to establish a European settlement when they set up a mission called Sainte-Anne-des-Pins, just before the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1883. The Sainte-Anne-des-Pins church played a prominent role in the development of Franco-Ontarian culture in the region. Coincidentally, Ste-Anne is the patron saint of miners.
thumb|left|A [[Canadian Pacific Railway junction in Sudbury in 1888. Construction for the railway led to the discovery of high concentrations of nickel-copper ore at the edge of the Sudbury Basin.]]
During construction of the railway in 1883, blasting and excavation revealed high concentrations of nickel-copper ore at Murray Mine on the edge of the Sudbury Basin. This discovery brought the first waves of European settlers, who arrived not only to work at the mines, but also to build a service station for railway workers. Provincial land surveyor JL Morris laid out the intersection of Elm Street and Durham Street in 1884 as he planned the township.
Rich deposits of nickel sulphide ore were discovered in the Sudbury Basin geological formation. The construction of the railway allowed exploitation of these mineral resources and shipment of the commodities to markets and ports, as well as large-scale lumber extraction.
Sudbury was incorporated as a town in 1893, and its first mayor was Joseph Étienne aka Stephen Fournier.
The American inventor Thomas Edison visited the Sudbury area as a prospector in 1901. He is credited with the original discovery of the ore body at Falconbridge.
Mining began to replace lumber as the primary industry as the area's transportation network was improved to include trams. These enabled workers to live in one community and work in another.
thumb|upright=1.6|left|Smelting works of the Canadian Copper Company prior to [[World War I. Most of the nickel mined from Sudbury was used in the manufacturing of artillery during the war.]]
Through the decades that followed, Sudbury's economy went through boom and bust cycles as world demand for nickel fluctuated. Demand was high during the First World War, when Sudbury-mined nickel was used extensively in the manufacturing of artillery in Sheffield, England. It bottomed out when the war ended and then rose again in the mid-1920s as peacetime uses for nickel began to develop. The town was reincorporated as a city in 1930.
The city recovered from the Great Depression much more quickly than almost any other city in North America due to increased demand for nickel in the 1930s. Sudbury was the fastest-growing city and one of the wealthiest cities in Canada for most of the decade. Many of the city's social problems in the Great Depression era were not caused by unemployment or poverty, but due to the difficulty in keeping up with all of the new infrastructure demands created by rapid growth — for example, employed mineworkers sometimes ended up living in boarding houses or makeshift shanty towns, because demand for new housing was rising faster than supply. Vale has begun to rehabilitate the slag heaps that surrounds their smelter in the Copper Cliff area with the planting of grass and trees, as well as the use of biosolids to stabilize and regreen tailings areas.
thumb|The [[Inco Superstack in 1976, four years after its completion. It was built to disperse sulphuric acid and reduce the acidity of local precipitation.]]
In 1978, the workers of Sudbury's largest mining corporation, Inco (now Vale), embarked on a strike over production and employment cutbacks. The strike, which lasted for nine months, badly damaged Sudbury's economy. The city government was spurred to launch a project to diversify the city's economy.
A unique and visionary project, Science North was inaugurated in 1984 with two-snowflake styled buildings connected by a tunnel through the Canadian shield where the Creighton fault intersects the shores of Lake Ramsey. The city tried to attract new employers and industries through the 1980s and 1990s with mixed success.
In 2006, both of the city's major mining companies, Canadian-based Inco and Falconbridge, were taken over by new owners: Inco was acquired by the Brazilian company CVRD (now renamed Vale), while Falconbridge was purchased by the Swiss company Xstrata, which itself was purchased by Anglo–Swiss Glencore, forming Glencore Xstrata. Xstrata donated the historic Edison Building, the onetime head office of Falconbridge, to the city in 2007 to serve as the new home of the municipal archives. On September 19, 2008, a fire destroyed the historic Sudbury Steelworkers Hall on Frood Road. A strike at Vale's operations, which began on July 13, 2009, was tentatively resolved in July 2010. The 2009 strike lasted longer than the devastating 1978 strike, but had a much more modest effect on the city's economy than the earlier action—unlike in 1978, the local rate of unemployment declined slightly during the 2009 strike.
The ecology of the Sudbury region has recovered dramatically, helped by regreening programs and improved mining practices. The United Nations honoured twelve cities in the world, including Sudbury, with the Local Government Honours Award at the 1992 Earth Summit to recognise the city's community-based environmental reclamation strategies. By 2010, the regreening programs had successfully rehabilitated of land in the city; however, approximately of land have yet to be rehabilitated.
Various studies have confirmed that the provincial government's initial claims that the municipal amalgamation would result in cost savings and increased efficiencies have not borne out, and in fact administration of the amalgamated city costs significantly more than the prior regional government structure did.
Geography
Sudbury has 330 lakes over in size within the city limits. The most prominent is Lake Wanapitei, one of the largest lakes in the world that is completely contained within a municipality. Ramsey Lake, a few kilometres south of downtown Sudbury, held a similar status before the municipal amalgamation in 2001 brought Lake Wanapitei fully inside the city limits. long thought to be the result of a meteorite collision, though more recent analysis has suggested that the crater may in fact have been created by a comet.
Sudbury's pentlandite, pyrite and pyrrhotite ores contain profitable amounts of many elements—primarily nickel and copper, but also platinum, palladium and other valuable metals.
Local smelting of the ore releases this sulphur into the atmosphere where it combines with water vapour to form sulphuric acid, contributing to acid rain. As a result, Sudbury has had a widespread reputation as a wasteland. In parts of the city, vegetation was devastated by acid rain and logging to provide fuel for early smelting techniques. To a lesser extent, the area's ecology was also impacted by lumber camps providing wood for the reconstruction of Chicago after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. While other logging areas in Northeastern Ontario were also involved in that effort, the emergence of mining-related processes in the following decade made it significantly harder for new trees to grow to full maturity in the Sudbury area than elsewhere.
Conservation Sudbury operates a conservation area, the Lake Laurentian Conservation Area, in the city's south end. Other unique environmental projects in the city include the Fielding Bird Sanctuary, a protected area along Highway 17 near Lively that provides a managed natural habitat for birds, and a hiking and nature trail near Coniston, which is named in honour of scientist Jane Goodall.
Six provincial parks (Chiniguchi River, Daisy Lake Uplands, Fairbank, Killarney Lakelands and Headwaters, Wanapitei and Windy Lake) and two provincial conservation reserves (MacLennan Esker Forest and Tilton Forest) are also located partially or entirely within the city boundaries.
Climate
Greater Sudbury has a humid continental climate (Köppen climate classification: Dfb). This region has warm and often humid summers with occasional short lasting periods of hot weather, with long, cold and snowy winters. It is situated north of the Great Lakes, making it prone to arctic air masses. Monthly precipitation is equal year round, with snow cover expected for up to six months of the year. Although extreme weather events are rare, one of the worst tornadoes in Canadian history struck the city and its suburbs on August 20, 1970, killing six people, injuring two hundred, and causing more than C$17 million (equivalent to $ million in ) in damages.
The highest temperature ever recorded in Greater Sudbury was on July 13, 1936.
|date=February 2012
|source 2= weatherstats.ca (for dewpoint and monthly&yearly average absolute maximum&minimum temperature)
Communities
The city of Sudbury and its suburban communities were reorganized into the Regional Municipality of Sudbury in 1973, which was subsequently merged in 2001 into the single-tier city of Greater Sudbury.
In common usage, the city's urban core is still generally referred to as Sudbury, while the outlying former towns are still referred to by their old names and continue in some respects to maintain their own distinct community identities despite their lack of political independence. Each of the seven former municipalities in turn encompasses numerous smaller neighbourhoods. Amalgamated cities (2001 Canadian census population) include: Sudbury (85,354) Towns (2001 Canadian census population) include: Rayside-Balfour (15,046), Nickel Centre (12,672), Walden (10,101), Onaping Falls (4,887), and Capreol (3,486). The Wanup area, formerly an unincorporated settlement outside of Sudbury's old city limits, was also annexed into the city in 2001, along with a large wilderness area on the northeastern shore of Lake Wanapitei.
Demographics
In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, Greater Sudbury had a population of living in of its total private dwellings, a change of from its 2016 population of . With a land area of , it had a population density of in 2021.
In 2021, the median age was 43.2 years, slightly higher than the provincial average of 41.6 years.
|1901|2027
|1911|4150
|1921|8621
|1931|18518
|1941|31888
|1951|42410
|1961|80120
|1971|90535
|1981|91829
|1991|92884
|1996|92059
|2001|85354