Good question. I noticed the glow across the lake during the outage and wondered the same thing. That was an interesting event. I cooked everything on the barbecue.

Thunder Bay is on its own grid also. So they had power the whole time also. Look up the map of power plants and you can see where all the power comes from and how different area are separated from larger population areas.

I think the Niagara Hydro electric plant was one of the black start facilities for the whole network. The water runs no matter what in a blackout, so hydroelectric plants provide the power to start up other power plants when they go offline if the power grid has a widespread failure. I'm guessing most of Niagara region pulls it's juice from Sir Adam Beck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start

Sort of makes one wonder why we don't generate a higher proportion of our power from hydroelectric plants since it's so much easier to get back online