The Globe is visiting communities across the country to hear from Canadians about the issues affecting their lives, their futures and their votes in this federal election.

Lefty Kamenawatamin was 15 years old when he went on his first train ride in 1979.

The former chief from Bearskin Lake First Nation says he was on his way to Winnipeg to visit his sister when he stopped in Sioux Lookout, a small rural railway town in Northwestern Ontario. He recalls construction workers hammering away on the new Sioux Hotel just across the street. It would later house The Whistle Stop for train passengers passing through, a coffee shop, a dining room and the infamous bar in the basement, known as the Zoo, where locals and visitors danced the night away to live music.

“It was an adventure … just seeing things that I’ve never seen before,” Mr. Kamenawatamin said.

Sioux Lookout was born a railway town in the early 1900s, a gateway to the 30 or so mostly remote First Nations further north. It once thrived with logging and a military radar base, with Front Street the bustling scene of day-to-night activity.

But now, the old Hudson’s Bay turned Northern Store, the movie theatre with the ice cream shop, and the hole-in-the-wall family-favourite Canadian-Chinese restaurant are all gone.

Owing to its geography, Sioux Lookout has always been a hub. But the pivot to a service-based economy has not brought prosperity. There is no industry and housing is hard to come by.

The situation frustrates local politicians and both long-time and new residents who continue to see the beauty and potential in the rugged region of thick boreal forests and freshwater lakes of the Canadian Shield, on the border of Treaty 3 and 9 territories.

The town’s largest employers are in the health care and child-welfare-services industries, drawing in Canadian newcomers and others as part of the federal government’s Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot, a program that ended last year.

The Sioux Hotel has been renovated into commercial office spaces with a multicultural youth centre. Other administrative offices have popped up down the street, including the one Mr. Kamenawatamin is helping set up for his community – a place where his First Nation’s members living off-reserve can get support.

Tim Yewchyn owns Charli’s Diner on Front Street and says the one constant in the slow decline of the thoroughfare has been the town’s homeless demographic. This past Christmas season he opened his restaurant doors to a free turkey dinner, his way of trying to make a difference. “I don’t think we necessarily look after [homeless] people in the way we should. Our shelters are full, we need to rely more on our Northern communities to assist with some displacement,” he said.

Born and raised in Sioux Lookout, Mr. Yewchyn said gone are the days of playing at the park at the train station across the street, waiting for the Saturday afternoon matinee. “Front Street used to be … the hub of everything,” he lamented.

The vibrancy of the community started to dim after the Canadian military closed the Sioux Lookout radar station in 1987. The train station isn’t one at all: Via Rail notes in a red banner on its website that the town is a “stop-on-request area.” Earlier this year, the family-owned lottery store in the oldest stone building on the block shut its doors after 40 years.

Any consumer activity has migrated to a new development area south of Front Street, which includes a Tim Hortons, Dairy Queen and Giant Tiger.

The local hospital is the last before the region stretches into a remote dense geographical area the size of France, where 30 or so communities are sprawled out. Most of them are accessible by plane and seasonal winter roads only. Sioux Lookout’s 6,100 residents are split about half Indigenous and half non-Indigenous, not including the constant cycle of medical patients and high school students from the remote north.

The community is part of the Kenora-Kiiwetinoong riding that has been mostly Conservative since 2008, except for a stint in 2015 when former Indian Affairs and Northern Development Minister Bob Nault re-entered federal politics after a decade’s absence. The riding has been identified by the Assembly of First Nations as having significant First Nations voters who can influence election outcomes.

Municipal councillor Reece Van Breda said the town’s economy is intertwined with the district’s northern First Nations, and crises there – issues such as mental health and housing – affect Sioux Lookout.

Pelican Falls Indian Residential School operated kilometres from the town.

Northwestern Ontario has grappled with the highest rates of opioid-related deaths in the province in recent years, including Sioux Lookout, which is part of the Northwestern Health Unit where opioid-toxicity death rates were the third-highest at one point in 2024, according to data from the Office of the Chief Coroner.

A report last year by the Sioux Lookout First Nations Health Authority, which serves 33 First Nations, found that, in 2021, visits to emergency departments for mental illness and substance use were 14 times the provincial rate. According to a Sioux Lookout OPP detachment report, it responded to 396 Mental Health Act occurrences in 2024, down slightly from 455 the year before.

“Health care in Sioux Lookout is a provincial issue, health care on First Nations is a federal issue. So, it always seems like we’re kind of caught in the middle because the feds and province obviously don’t talk well enough together,” Mr. Van Breda said. “These issues shouldn’t be a partisan issue if [the governments] are able to work meaningfully together with our MP, with our MPP … we are struggling for no reason.”

Like cities and towns across Canada, residents say more housing is needed to ensure the community can provide the employment opportunities Sioux Lookout needs to thrive.

Palak Gulati relocated to Sioux Lookout last April from Toronto where she lived as a student on a study permit. She is working toward obtaining permanent residency but her future is now uncertain because Sioux Lookout wasn’t included in Ottawa’s latest rural community immigration pilot program.

“It is getting a little crowded now, and we don’t have much accommodations,” she said about newcomers to Sioux Lookout.

Ms. Gulati, the checkout supervisor at the town’s largest and longest-operating grocery store, Freshmarket Foods, says she’s found a peace in Northern Ontario that she feels doesn’t exist in busy urban centres like the GTA or even Thunder Bay, the nearest city.

‘We get a chance to know ourselves and everything around us too. So, I would say living in smaller communities is much better than living in a bigger city,” she said.