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“In the North, trailers are more accepted than buses,” Holliday observes good humouredly, and without implying the party could afford a bus — or indeed, even this trailer, which belongs to Holliday’s uncle.

“We’re not looking to do anything negative. We want the people of Northern Ontario to be able to be heard, and we want to be that voice. So we will ask the people what they want, and if the majority of people want to have our own province, standalone province, then that’s something we have to aim towards,” Holliday says. “‘Separatist’ is negative. We’re not leaving the country. We’re not proposing to leave the country. We’re creating the idea of, instead of just saying we’re Northern Ontario, let us be Northern Ontario … If the people of the North want it, then why wouldn’t we want to try? Is it impossible? Nothing’s impossible.”

Politically, Northern Ontario is the 80 per cent of the province’s land mass that spans the vast boreal forest and the Hudson Bay lowlands with their natural resources, the Great Lakes shipping routes, all the way south to luxurious Muskoka cottage country. As Holliday puts it: “Kenora to Mattawa, Gravenhurst to James Bay.”

It is a region that struggles under the high cost of electricity delivery, the closure of rail service, the pressures of migration to the southern population belt, the aging of those who remain, and the perception of lost opportunities in an extraction sector that ships its resources to places like the steel mill cluster in Huntington, W. Va rather than processing them locally. There is a century-old sense of neglect and resentment..