Greater Sudbury, Ontario
Valley East is a residential area of about 17,000 people in the north end of Greater Sudbury, Ontario, made up of four adjacent communities on the floor of the Sudbury Basin: Hanmer, Val Caron, Val Thérèse, and Blezard Valley. It is one of those places that has no single downtown because it is not really one place — it is a stitching-together of four small settlements that share schools, arenas, and a French-Canadian identity strong enough that the community centre menu, the road signs, and half the conversations at the arena are in French.
Valley East sits on flat, fertile ground in the Sudbury Basin, which is unusual for Greater Sudbury — most of the region is Canadian Shield rock and second-growth pine. The Basin itself is the eroded remains of one of the largest impact craters on Earth, formed by a meteorite roughly 1.85 billion years ago, and the soils are good enough that Valley East was historically dairy and vegetable country. Some of that farmland is still active; much of it now sits under subdivision.
The four settlements were founded in the early 1900s — Hanmer as a township in 1904, Blezard in 1906. Hanmer and Blezard amalgamated into the Township of Valley East in 1969, became the Town of Valley East in 1973 as part of broader regional restructuring, and then became the City of Valley East in 1997 — Ontario's newest city for four short years. On January 1, 2001, Valley East was dissolved into the newly-created City of Greater Sudbury along with the other outer municipalities.
Valley East is one of the strongest Franco-Ontarian communities in northeastern Ontario. French-language elementary and secondary schools serve most of the district's young families; parish life in Hanmer and Val Caron is bilingual with a heavy French tilt; and civic services from Greater Sudbury are available in both languages here in a way they are not everywhere in the city. The names on the mailboxes tell most of the story — Guilbeault, Larocque, Lévesque, Boucher, Béland.
Day to day, Valley East is what a Sudbury suburb looks like: single-family houses on winter-friendly lots, hockey arenas, a couple of grocery stores, a scattering of restaurants, and the Howard Armstrong Recreation Centre in Hanmer, built after amalgamation. Most residents work in Sudbury proper, twenty minutes south. The area sits within Greater Sudbury Wards 5, 6, and 7 for city council purposes. It is not a place that markets itself, which is part of its point.