Weekly Regional Business Intelligence
|
|
|
“Ninety per cent of selling is conviction and 10 per cent is persuasion.” — Shiv Khera
|
|
 |
|
Organizers cancel 2024 Home County Folk Festival, future in limbo
Things aren’t looking great for Home County Folk Festival, which announced the cancellation of its 2024 event this week, citing financial difficulties. “We know this cancellation is going to be met with great sadness,” said Home County Folk League’s board chair Sara Lanthier. “We had to set aside personal feelings and recognize our current financial situation and difficulties in recruiting and retaining volunteers would make holding the festival irresponsible.” Just how bad the finances are is hard to say, but Lanthier estimated that this year’s festival ran a loss of around $30,000. The festival itself is largely volunteer-run, and generally runs on a by-donation basis for guests. The organization will be meeting at the end of November for its AGM, where they expect to discuss their financial position and future options.
The upshot: The loss would be substantial for the arts community in town, and the natural next question will be whether there is a stable pool of funding ― either via sponsorship, patronage or public support ― that they might be able to tap into. The London Arts Council says it is planning to meet with the organization, saying they would “navigate and figure things out together.” They aren’t the only folk fest in trouble, either ― the Vancouver Folk Fest called off its 2023 event, similarly citing cost pressures. It will also be a loss for the local tourist economy: pre-pandemic estimates put the economic impact of Home County at around $1.4 million per year.
Read more: London Free Press | London News Today
|
|
|
 |
|
Council approves rezoning for York Developments’ ambitious twin towers at Forks of the Thames
City council approved a proposal for two soaring residential towers comprising some 800 units, plus commercial and office space, on Tuesday. The proposal comes from York Developments, which required a rezoning approval from the city to build the towers at the forks of the Thames River, which would exceed the 35-storey maximum downtown at 53 and 43 storeys (once constructed, the tallest of the towers will be the tallest building anywhere between the GTA and Edmonton). The towers have been backed by many supporters of improving residential density in the core, including Mayor Josh Morgan, who talks about this Toronto-style densification as key to boosting the housing stock. “This is what our downtown needs,” he says. “People do not build 53-storey buildings everywhere in this country, they build them in places where they have confidence in the future of those locations.” In lieu of affordable units, York Developments sweetened its contribution agreement with the city to include a $600,000 donation to Indwell, an affordable housing operator.
The upshot: Getting a mega-tower proposal through any city hall is an accomplishment all its own, but some of the tricky work is still to come. There were two skeptics on council ― Councillors Sam Trosow and David Ferreira ― who both expressed concerns around two issues that are likely to be complex files as the building goes through post-approval finalization. On the one hand, there’s the towers’ proximity to the former Middlesex County Court House ― a national heritage site adjacent to the development, for which accommodations will need to be made. The other is sewage capacity, something Councillor Trosow said there were unanswered questions about. Still, for a city eager to see more density in its downtown core, the proposal is generally quite popular among city officials.
Read more: CBC London News | CTV News London
|
|
|
 |
|
Push to digitization to add 90 new staff at LHSC
London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) announced this week plans to hire 90 new staff as part of a “major project” to fully digitize medical records. Dubbed “OneChart,” it’s a multi-million-dollar project that hopes to consolidate all of the records between 11 Southwestern Ontario hospitals into one database. “We are changing how healthcare is delivered across a huge portion of Southwestern Ontario and improving quality for patients and that is exciting,” said Andrew Mes, the hospital’s digital health executive and corporate information officer. The hospital said the effort to digitize will help streamline operations and reduce errors as patients transfer from provider to provider within the area. “A pen and a piece of paper is not enough,” Mes said. “We need digital information so that we can use it first and foremost for quality patient care but also for research, education and system planning.” Almost 70 of the 90 positions are starting to hire immediately, with the digitization work starting next year.
The upshot: It might be a surprising revelation to some that in the twenty-first century, many medical records are still pen-and-paper affairs. There have been calls for years to modernize and consolidate the way medical records are kept in Canada, but with 10-plus different healthcare systems with varying levels of infrastructure, finding a solution for every system has remained elusive. Elsewhere in LHSC news, the hospital also announced that the Kirk Baines and the Gerald C. Baines Foundation had made a $1.7-million donation to the Gerald C. Baines Centre for Translational Cancer Research that would “allow the team at the Baines Centre to scale up existing resources, personnel and clinical trials.”
Read more: CBC News London | CTV News London
|
|
|
 |
|
Legal weed turns five, industry calls for regulatory changes
Happy fifth birthday to legal cannabis in Canada. Tuesday marked five years since recreational cannabis was legalized, and the explosion of the retail market, in particular, is obvious to anyone who travels around the city. According to MJBizDaily, London is home to 54 retail shops ― 10th most in the nation and inclusive of a couple of unsanctioned Indigenous-run pot shops ― and a few producers, most notably Indiva, which has grown into one of the nation’s leading suppliers of edibles. One local cannabis employee – Crystal Casimir, assistant manager at Right Puff Cannabis – told CTV News that for all its ups and downs, the legal market has a pretty wide customer base. “All walks of life, all age groups,” she told CTV. “We see a variety of people right from 20 years old to 90 years old coming in. We’ve got our professionals. We’ve got our students. So, it’s a wide range of people we get to see every day.”
The upshot: There really wasn’t much fanfare for the five-year anniversary this week, and if anything, it was more of an opportunity for the industry to highlight its many struggles. Complaints about tax burdens, potency limits, store clustering and the persistence of an unregulated market are common in the industry, which has seen a lot of consolidation and bankruptcies over the last few years. Even market leaders, like Indiva, have battled with declining revenues and have struggled to stay in the black over the years. There’s also been a lot of frustration aimed at the federal government for this ― the industry complains that they’ve been slow-walking a review of the Cannabis Act. “It’s been a low-margin environment,” said the Cannabis Council of Canada’s George Smitherman. “About 80 per cent of our surveyed members cannot get to cash flow positivity.”
Read more: CTV News London | BNN Bloomberg
|
|
|
|
Alimentiv Budweiser Gardens upgrades get green light
At the same council meeting where it approved the York Developments’ towers, council agreed to a proposal that would see them spend $26 million on upgrades to Budweiser Gardens. The city will be paying 80 per cent of the total $33-million cost of the upgrades, which include improvements made to private suites, the London Knights dressing room, concessions, event space and back-end technology, among other things. Supporters of the proposal have cast it as a matter of staying competitive. “This will allow us to be a bigger and better bidder for events,” Deputy Mayor Shawn Lewis said. “The consequence of us not doing this is that we become less competitive.” With approvals in hand, the work is set to proceed in two phases and is expected to begin next year, likely sometime after the OHL season concludes.
The upshot: City politicians were convinced to support the deal in part by a KPMG report that suggested it could reap significant returns for city coffers. According to KPMG, the city could receive as much as $53 million in return over the next 30 years as part of its revenue-sharing agreements with the operators of the city-owned arena. That report was also the source of the only dissenting vote on council, which came from Councillor Trosow, who has, over the last couple weeks, been concerned that politicians have not actually been able to see KPMG’s report, nor have they been able to look at the financials of its operating partner.
Read more: London Free Press | Global News London
|
|
|
|
From the magazine: A feast for the eyes
In the graphic design world, working in food packaging is a bit like playing in the major leagues. Where else is the division between consumer needs and impulses more influenced by branding, colour, design and vibe? Where else is the competition so steep?
Read more: London Inc.
|
|
|
|
Dispatch: October 20, 2023
A summary of recent business appointments and announcements, plus event listings for the upcoming week.
View listings here
|
|
|
|
|
|
