Weekly Regional Business Intelligence | | | Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. | | | Councillors vote to give themselves 35 per cent pay hike City councillors voted to give themselves a hefty raise this week. Tuesday’s meeting of the Strategic Priorities and Policies saw councillors vote 12 to three in favour of a 35 per cent pay increase, taking the base salary for councillors in the next term (starting after next year’s municipal elections) from just shy of $70k to just over $94k, a number picked because it represents the 70th percentile of the median full-time income of the London region, as opposed to pegging it at the median income. It also voted on a severance policy that will give outgoing councillors up to four weeks of pay if they lose their seat in a municipal election. Councillors justified the move as a way to attract talent to the position, as well as to reflect the kinds of responsibilities the job entails. “In order to have more people running, and more diversity of representation around the horseshoe, I think it’s important that we compensate people effectively for the role,” said Councillor Skylar Franke. Councillor Hadleigh McAlister said he felt “sometimes that’s forgotten in the conversation that this is an important job with a lot of responsibilities, and I think the pay has to reflect that.” The upshot: Yes, but raising councillor pay at this economic moment may not be the best optics, and three councillors — Paul Van Meerbergen, Corrine Rahman and Susan Stevenson — were vocally against the pay hike. “Londoners aren’t sure if they’re going to be employed next week, let alone next month, and they see their elected representatives giving themselves healthy raises? I’m just not in favour of that,” said Councillor Van Meerbergen. The argument about politician pay is an age-old one in town. One side of the argument says that by paying well, you attract good people to the job and disincentivize petty corruption; the other side says that politicians might make better decisions if their pay is tied to what regular folks earn. “It’s the kind of thing that is tough to get support for,” Matt Farrell, a political science instructor at Fanshawe College, told The London Free Press. “If you’re a politician voting to raise your own salary, that is going to be met with a degree of skepticism.” Read more: CTV News London | London Free Press | | | Fanshawe pulls financial support for 106.9 The X Fanshawe College says it is ending its financial support for the college radio station, 106.9 The X. In a statement to CBC News London, Fanshawe said that “we can’t continue to operate it at a significant financial loss every year, and without the majority of the students who work at the station,” referring to the students in the radio broadcast program, which was one of about 40 programs suspended earlier this year amid financial challenges for the college. The college has set a November 14 deadline for the radio station in hopes that someone potentially comes forward with a solution to support the station. “Since we value the station and the important role it plays…we have been actively looking for community stakeholders to keep the station operating,” the statement reads. The station first began broadcasting exactly 47 years ago today, on Halloween 1978. The upshot: It may not be curtains for the radio station, since Fanshawe is only making the decision to cancel financial support (as opposed to definitively taking the station off the air) and there will likely be some frantic efforts to save the station over the next couple of weeks. Bob Collins, former program coordinator of Fanshawe’s journalism and radio departments, told CBC there have been discussions with other broadcasters about taking over the CRTC license, and also suggested that there might be a partnership opportunity with Western’s radio station. If the station does go, though, it will be a big loss for Fanshawe’s generally well-regarded media and journalism program, which also lost its student newspaper, the Interrobang, earlier this year. That said, Fanshawe still has an internal radio station called CFRL, a sister station to 106.9, that is expected to continue operating for the time being. Read more: CBC News London | | | Shrugging off regional auto sector misery, PowerCo hits construction milestone The Volkswagen-backed PowerCo EV battery plant in St. Thomas has officially broken ground on their $7 billion gigafactory. Workers with Magill Construction started pouring the foundation for three major buildings, totalling around 79,000 square metres this week. “The mayor hasn’t stopped smiling since,” St. Thomas Mayor Joe Preston told CTV News London. “Generations in the future can stay here, have a job that pays well enough to buy a home in St. Thomas and become part of a really vibrant community.” Politicians at other levels of government were happy to champion the progress, given the bloodbath of news that has befallen the Southwestern Ontario auto sector over the past few weeks. “This investment is driving real opportunity across our region by creating good jobs, building strong partnerships and restoring pride in Ontario’s manufacturing roots,” said Elgin-Middlesex-London MPP Rob Flack. “The future of our province’s auto sector is being built right here in St. Thomas, and it will benefit local families for generations to come.” The upshot: The camp of cynics, who question the likelihood of this plant ever producing batteries, has probably gained a few members over the last few weeks, however. “We are seeing, unfortunately, more or less the final exodus of the North American model of car manufacturing from Canada right now,” said Ivey professor Andreas Schotter, speaking to CBC News London. “I’m hopeful for the plant, but I’m still not betting my salary on it getting built.” On the less cynical side, other analysts suggest this plant is too central to Volkswagen’s larger North American production plans, which include two existing assembly plants in Tennessee and Mexico. “It would be very difficult and expensive to start that from scratch at another location,” countered Ivey prof Klaus Meyer, also speaking to CBC. “It would take years of preparation if they wanted to do that somewhere else.” Read more: CTV News London | CBC News London | | | Ruby Liu loses bid to take over HBC leases. So, what’s next? B.C. billionaire Ruby Liu has lost her legal bid to acquire 25 Hudson’s Bay store leases, which included the one at CF Masonville Place. The Ontario Superior Court decision rejected Liu’s bid and her plan to launch a chain of department stores named after herself — a plan that Judge Peter Osborne called “superficial,” adding that the “overall lack of experience at the leadership level represents a significant risk to the operation viability of launching and managing 25 large department stores in the contemplated timeline.” The ruling cancels out most of the $69 million deal that HBC had brokered with Liu (the judge allowed three of the leases to be transferred to Liu) and will ultimately free up the space at Masonville for a new anchor tenant. The upshot: The news will come as a win for Cadillac Fairview, owners of Masonville, which had firmly opposed Liu’s plan. “[CF] firmly believe the ‘Ruby Liu’ concept is highly likely to fail and has little to no chance of success,” lawyers for Cadillac Fairview wrote in an affidavit earlier this year. But then the question is, if not Ruby Liu, then what will take over the former Bay locations? That is, at the moment, still unclear. The whole process of trying to find new tenants to take over these leases had kind of been put on hold while the courts sorted out Liu’s audacious bid, so it will be interesting to see what comes up now that the plan is dead. Some of the commercial landlords had argued pretty strongly that Liu’s plans for mixed-use units that included dining, entertainment and recreation weren’t possible under the existing leases, even if retail experts like Carl Boutet suggested that the plans themselves were good, forward-thinking uses of department store space. “You could see that she believed in the concept as something that would bring people together, something that went beyond just shopping,” Boutet told Retail Insider. “The problem wasn’t belief, it was execution.” Read more: Retail Insider | CBC News | | | Tower proposed for York & Colborne streets Local developer BSN London has filed a proposal for a 38-storey, 422-unit tower at York and Colborne streets. “It’s just continued confidence in the development of downtown London, seeing this type of investment being brought forward,” said Michael Davis, partner at Siv-ik Planning and Design Inc., which is working with BSN on the project. If built, the project would include commercial space on the ground level and a 416-car parking garage. “I think the commercial spaces and the small businesses they’ll attract will be a nice amenity not only for residents of this building, but also for existing residents in the area,” Davis told The London free Press. The site has long been used as a parking lot, and there is a public meeting scheduled for early January to discuss the proposal. The upshot: Despite its name not officially being attached to the proposal, this has all the markings of a Farhi Holdings move. Siv-ik has a website set up that states that “Farhi Holdings Corp is planning an exciting new high-density residential development on the property known as 415 York Street,” and a number of planning documents bear the name FHC (Farhi Holdings Corporation). So, perhaps the more interesting question here might be why Farhi is taking steps to obscure its role in this project? One plausible explanation is that Farhi is hoping to get the zoning changes in order before selling the land, which is currently listed as a development opportunity on its website. So, time will tell whether this will actually get built or if the play here is to re-zone the existing parking lot before flipping the land to someone else. Read more: London Free Press | | | City gets small business centre for Uber drivers There are now more than 7,500 Uber and Lyft drivers in the city, but without any type of corporate footprint in London, those drivers don’t have much in the way of face-to-face support. But a new business might be changing that. CBC News London reported on the new Uber Business Hub, an independent operation located at 344 Richmond Street set up by former Uber driver Momen Aghber, who said it is providing training and support for the city’s gig economy workers (he also manages a 20-vehicle fleet of Ubers.) “Drivers see Uber as a faceless company,” he told CBC News London. “Sometimes it’s AI that replies to you and you don’t get real answers.” Drivers, he said, can drop in for support and help with paperwork and customer support. The upshot: It’s a curious business in that there’s so obviously a need and demand for support, but it’s also a bit of a minefield. Uber seemed to distance itself from the operation, and there’s probably some complicated layers of liability here. But still, on paper, it looks like valuable support for drivers who often lack much in that department, and an acknowledgement that every Uber you see on the roads is a tiny little business that might need help on the business side of things. “Drivers think of it as an easy side-hustle,” Aghber told CBC. “[But] they don’t know the things behind it and what you need to operate this business. At the end of the day, it’s a business.” Read more: CBC News London | | | LHSC boosts recruitment efforts with $1,500 incentive for employees Hoping to aid recruitment of nurses, London Health Sciences Centre is launching a referral incentive program. Employees could be paid $1,500 if they are able to refer a candidate for some of the healthcare positions that are harder to fill, the hospital said. “We had a small group of roles that continue to be a bit of a challenges to recruit for,” said VP of human resources Julia Marchesan, speaking to CBC News London. “It made sense for us to adopt a program that so many of our peers had already undertaken.” These positions include anesthesia assistants, neurophysiologists, radiation technologists and psychologists. Currently, LHSC’s job vacancy rate is low — under four per cent — “but there are moments when we have to dig a bit deeper to recruit other candidates and convince them to come to London,” Marchesan said. The upshot: Recruiting for jobs in healthcare, even if they can be well-remunerated positions, has been a major challenge for health agencies across the province. “Burnout is very prevalent among the healthcare community, especially among nurses,” one RN, Jieun Hwang, said in a Canadian Institute for Health Information report on the challenges of staffing and recruitment. We’re not quite at the levels we saw during the height of the pandemic years, where governments were throwing money at anyone and everyone who was thinking of taking a nursing degree, but many of the core challenges persist, especially when you’re looking at jobs outside the rank and file of the nursing staff. Plus, the amount paid out to private agency nurses grew to be quite substantial, which is harder to sustain in a tighter-spending environment. “It kind of makes sense when you think about the amount of money that firms are putting into recruitment,” said Schulich School of Medicine professor Maria Mathews. “Leaning into these connections and personal networks is just another way to ensure that potential candidates hear about these positions.” Read more: CBC News London | | | Dispatch: October 31, 2025 A summary of recent business appointments and announcements, plus event listings for the upcoming week. View listings here | | | | |