This afternoon, Lorie and Brian Young were proud to announce that they are building a new Wolves Den/Canco Gas Bar complete with a Tim Hortons adjacent to their current site on 35 Beaucage Park Road, on Highway 17 West.
“My husband Brian and I have been working on this project for seven years,” Lorie Young told the gathered crowd of about 40 people, “and it’s finally coming to fruition.”
Construction is set to begin next week, and doors should open in November or December. Everything available at the Wolves Den will be at the new store. More gas pumps will be installed, and more room for big rigs is included in the design.
The Tim Horton’s will be a full-menu restaurant with a large seating area. Of note in the drawings are two totem poles standing beside the front entrance – an important feature for Young. “We wanted to make it really Indigenous,” she said. There are plans to have local artists decorate the windows as well, once windows are installed. “We also sell a lot of Native crafts in our store,” she added.
Young had many to thank for helping her and Brian along their seven-year journey, and she was especially grateful for the support of their families and of Nipissing First Nation.
“So many at Nipissing First Nation Band Office played such a big part in this,” she said. “Any time I needed help, I reached out, and they were right there to help me along.”
She emphasized the need for community support to complete such a project. Before the well-wishers arrived for the ground-breaking, the couple held a small ceremony “to thank Mother Earth for providing this land for us,” and the experience reminded her of “why we’re doing this.”
“Brian and I are business people, but we’re community people first,” she said. “We want to be successful so we can bring this back to our community. When we succeed, our community succeeds,” she told the crowd.
“And that’s the plan. We want our Nation to succeed.”
See: Nipissing First Nation launching chamber of commerce
Chief Scott McLeod attended, and he noted that a lot of other First Nations take on a business role – for example, it would purchase and operate a Tim Hortons. “What we do here in Nipissing, is try to support the entrepreneurs, to give them the opportunities.”
“We’re a government, we’re not there to be in business,” he added. “So, we try to provide a good environment for our band members to take those opportunities and turn them into something very meaningful.”
David Briggs is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of BayToday, a publication of Village Media. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.
