Straddling the border between Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Flin Flon occupies a unique position in Canadian geography. The city sits on a correction line dividing the two provinces, with the greater portion of its land falling within Manitoba. This means that residents travelling southwest find themselves in Saskatchewan, while heading northeast puts them in Manitoba. With a population of 5,185 recorded in the 2016 census – 4,982 on the Manitoba side and 203 in Saskatchewan – the city is jointly administered by both provinces, an arrangement that makes it genuinely unlike almost anywhere else in Canada.
Flin Flon was founded in 1927 by what is now known as Hudbay, originally called Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Co., to extract the area’s substantial copper and zinc deposits. In the late 1920s, the company invested in a railway, a mine, a smelter, and a hydroelectric power plant at Island Falls, Saskatchewan, with the rail line reaching the mine by 1928. The population grew through the 1930s as people left farms abandoned during the Great Depression to seek work in the mines. The municipality was incorporated on January 1, 1933, and achieved city status in 1970. The city takes its name from a fictional character, Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin, from the 1905 novel The Sunless City by British author J. E. Preston Muddock. Prospector Tom Creighton reportedly had a copy of the book and nicknamed his copper discovery after the novel’s submarine-piloting protagonist. A statue of the character, locally nicknamed Flinty, was designed by cartoonist Al Capp and remains one of the city’s recognisable landmarks. In 2003, the local Chamber of Commerce had special coins minted – a three-dollar coin and later a five-dollar coin – accepted as legal tender among participating local retailers for several years.