250 1. INTRODUCTION: The Vulnerability of the Traditional Mining Model However, a traditional mining-centric model can create long-term structural vulnerability when regional prosperity remains tied primarily to finite resources and volatile commodity markets. Mines are temporary, but communities, infrastructure, and social systems are intended to endure. This mismatch creates a central planning challenge for mining regions: how can temporary extractive activity be used to build lasting prosperity rather than dependency? Sudbury, Ontario, is a key case study in navigating this transition. Once infamous for severe industrial degradation, the region was left with an inhospitable “moonscape” after a century of logging, smelting, and acidification. Since then, Sudbury has earned international recognition for environmental recovery, including the planting of more than 14 million trees and the restoration of damaged ecosystems (Ghougassian, 2012). This history demonstrates both the consequences of a narrow extractive model and the region’s capacity for large-scale transformation. With the region successfully regreened, Sudbury is now positioned for a second transformation: moving from environmental recovery towards a more diversified, knowledgebased, and resilient economy beyond mining. This paper argues that Sudbury can build on its mining strengths to underpin broader regional prosperity. The proposed transition does not reject mining; rather, it reframes mining as an enabler of new economic pillars, including subsurface innovation, environmental remediation, clean technologies, and Indigenous-led stewardship. The Designing Sustainable Prosperity (DSP) framework offers a structured approach to making this transition practical and measurable, helping the region achieve lasting, shared prosperity without fostering dependence on finite mineral extraction. 2. 'THE WHY': Evidence of the Prosperity Paradox Recent OECD evidence and regional sustainability assessments indicate that Northern Ontario exhibits characteristics of a "prosperity paradox". Mining subregions generate higher income and economic activity than non-mining regions, but this prosperity is not consistently translated into innovation, equity, infrastructure quality, or long-term resilience. In other words, the region has valuable assets and capabilities, yet its development outcomes remain uneven. One indicator of this challenge is the gap between research and technical capability, on the one hand, and protected or scalable intellectual property, on the other. Although mining innovation is often protected through trade secrets, proprietary processes, and confidential operational knowledge rather than patents, patent output still provides a useful signal of how effectively regional expertise is being formalized and scaled (OECD, 2025). OECD data suggest that Sudbury and Northern Ontario remain below rural Canadian and OECD mining-region benchmarks on this measure (Table 1).
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