Greater Sudbury is a city in Northern Ontario, Canada. Greater Sudbury was created in 2001 by amalgamating the cities and towns of the former Regional Municipality of Sudbury, along with several previously unincorporated geographic townships.

It is the largest city in Northern Ontario in population, and the 24th largest metropolitan area in Canada. In land area, it is the largest city in Ontario, the seventh largest municipality by area in Canada and the largest municipality in English Canada legally designated as a city.

Greater Sudbury is one of only five cities in Ontario — the others are Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton and Kawartha Lakes — that constitute their own independent census divisions, and are not part of any district, county or regional municipality.

It is also the only city in Ontario which has two official names — its name in French is Grand-Sudbury. Unlike designations such as Greater Toronto or Greater Montreal, the name "Greater Sudbury" refers to a single city, not a conurbation of independent municipalities. However, the name Sudbury, without its official modifiers, is still the more common name for the city in everyday usage.

The city's Census Metropolitan Area consists of the city proper and the First Nations reserves of Whitefish Lake and Wahnapitae, and had a population of 158,258 in the 2006 census. Statistics Canada estimates the Greater Sudbury CMA's population as 165,322 as of 2009. Informally, some residents of the area may also consider the metropolitan area to include the towns of Markstay-Warren, St. Charles and French River, a region commonly known as Sudbury East, as well as the outlying unincorporated communities of Estaire and Cartier.

Economy

Despite its unique challenges, Sudbury has seen significant success in diversifying its economy. While mining remains an important industry, Sudbury also derives economic strength as a centre of commerce, government, tourism and science and technology research. Although Vale remains the city's largest single employer, it accounts for less than five per cent of the city's workforce, compared to 25 per cent or more in the 1970s, and the mining industry is no longer the city's largest sector of employment, being outranked by education, health care, public administration, retail trade, hospitality services and mining equipment manufacturing. An ongoing strike at Vale's operations, which began in 2009, has now lasted longer than the devastating 1978 strike — but has had a much more modest effect on the city's economy than the earlier action.

Communities

The name Greater Sudbury is almost exclusively a political designation. In common usage, the city is still generally referred to as Sudbury. The usage Greater City of Sudbury (rather than City of Greater Sudbury) is also heard on occasion, but is incorrect.

Outside of the region, the name Sudbury is still commonly understood to refer only to the former city of Sudbury, with the outlying communities often believed to remain distinct from the city. Some of the outlying communities, for example, still retain their own distinct postal and telephone exchange codes, and for several years after the amalgamation residents in many rural parts of the city still could not call other rural parts of the city without incurring long distance charges — Bell Canada did not expand local calling area service in the city until December 2007.

In local usage, however, the name Sudbury is more ambiguous — depending on the speaker, it may refer either to the city as a whole or exclusively to the urban core of old Sudbury. However, the names of the former suburban municipalities are still sometimes used to refer to the communities within their boundaries. Several of the city's community action networks, volunteer committees which are responsible for organizing and managing the city's recreational and cultural services in a specific community, retain the names and service boundaries of their pre-2001 municipalities — only the old city and the former town of Nickel Centre are divided into multiple CANs.

Culture

Science and Technology
Sudbury was one of the first Canadian cities to plan and implement its own digital telecommunications strategy. Beginning in 1996, the city began constructing a fiber-optic network which saw over 400 kilometres of cable laid down to serve the city's business and citizen populations. This has allowed the general public to enjoy broadband internet at higher speeds than many other cities. Traditionally, the highest speed on broadband available to the public is 6Mbit/s. Residents within the urban core can get resident broadband access at 16Mbit/s. In November 2005, the city was named one of the world's "Smart 21 Communities" by the Intelligent Community Forum, a worldwide project to honour technological innovation. Other named cities included Waterloo, Ottawa, Philadelphia, Dubai, Seoul, London, Manchester and Melbourne.

Arts and Theatre
The city is home to two art galleries, the Art Gallery of Sudbury and La Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario. Both are dedicated primarily to Canadian art, especially but not exclusively artists from Northern Ontario. The city has two professional theatre companies, the anglophone Sudbury Theatre Centre and the francophone Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario. The STC has its own theatre venue downtown, while the TNO stages its productions at La salle André Paiement, a venue located on the campus of Collège Boréal. Theatre productions are also staged by students at Laurentian University's affiliated Thornloe faculty, by a community theatre company at Cambrian College, as well as by high school drama students at Sudbury Secondary School, Lo-Ellen Park Secondary School and École secondaire MacDonald-Cartier.

An annual film festival, Cinéfest, is also held in the city each September. The animated CBC Television series Chilly Beach is produced at March Entertainment's Sudbury studio.

The city is investigating the possibility of an 1,800-seat performing arts centre, in addition to an arts and entertainment district in the downtown core.

Media

As the largest city in Northeastern Ontario, Greater Sudbury is the region's primary media centre. Due to the relatively small size of the region's individual media markets, most of the region is served at least partially by Sudbury-based media — CICI-TV produces almost all local programming on the CTV Northern Ontario system, and the CBC Radio stations CBCS-FM and CBON-FM broadcast to the entire region through extensive rebroadcaster networks. As well, most of the commercial radio stations in Northeastern Ontario's smaller cities simulcast programming produced in Sudbury for at least a portion of their programming schedules, particularly in weekend and evening slots.

Source: Wikipedia

For more up-to-date information, you can visit the City of Greater Sudbury web site.