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Originally Posted by IRT_BMT_IND
It is quite amazing to think that Cornwall actually had a trolleybus system in the past. Its population has been more or less stagnant since the mid-80s, which I guess is not as bad as rust belt style double-digit population decline, but is still really bad given the insane growth in Ontario.
One thing about Cornwall is that while it was not alone in dealing with the effects of deindustrialization, unlike a lot of other places in Ontario there really wasn't a lot of things to fall back on. Cornwall doesn't have things like a university, or (I'm pretty sure) any large scale institutional or public sector employers (like the CRA in Sudbury), and it doesn't really have anything to attract tourists besides maybe stopping for McDonalds or Tim's on trips on the 401 or to the US. It was also too far from the GTA (and important transportation and trade routes in the US) to benefit from any agglomeration effects.
I also believe Cornwall was more connected economically to Montreal than the rest of Ontario (the major employers there like CIL and Domtar were based in Montreal), so a lot of the socioeconomic changes in the 70s and 80s wrt. Quebec's relationship to the rest of Canada probably hurt (I'm saying that Cornwall will never be Montreal's KW despite the similar distance) though I don't know the history here well enough to say anything definitive.
Also, Cornwall was a chemical industry town, and quite nasty chemical manufacturing as well. At one point it was one of the most polluted places in Canada, and there are still huge swathes of land there that are badly contaminated and would likely cost more to remediate properly than they're worth. Cornwall had a reputation as a smokestack town when I was a kid and that kind of reputation sticks.
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A few years ago, when there was a whole political controversy over Doug Ford cancelling a plan to build Ontario's first wholly francophone university in Toronto, there was a lot of discussion about how Toronto was a poor choice to build a francophone university given how far it is from any of Ontario's francophone regions. And IIRC quite a few people suggested Cornwall as a potential new location, given their historical francophone community, the city's desperate need for an economic boost, and proximity to Montreal (for easier recruitment of professors and the like).
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