London Inc. Weekly

Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

London is getting an IKEA (again!)

After a few false starts, IKEA is officially coming to London. Well, sort of. They’re opening a “new type of small format store” in a portion of the former Hudson’s Bay unit at White Oaks Mall, announced mall owners Westdell Development Corp. on Thursday. The IKEA store will eventually occupy about 43,000 of the 165,000 vacant square feet left by the Bay’s demise, with more news to come on the development of the rest of the space. “By offering the iconic IKEA store experience on a smaller scale, we are leaning into the physical store that we are best known for while delivering an innovative approach that reflects a rapidly changing retail landscape,” said Selwyn Crittendon, CEO of IKEA Canada. 

The upshot: Yes, it’s a far cry from the 270,000 square-foot store first announced in 2017 and later cancelled, so die-hard IKEA fans might be a little let down by this announcement, but it’s an IKEA all the same, and London gets to serve in its time-honoured role as a test market — this time for the company’s new smaller-store format concept in Canada. “The London area has always been an important market for IKEA Canada,” said Crittendon, “and we’re thrilled to build on our existing presence with this exciting new store concept.” (In actuality, IKEA has already dipped its toes into the small-store concept in other Canadian centres, recently opting to close a unit in the Scarborough Town Centre). In any case, it’s a bit more IKEA than we have now, which is limited to a plan-and-order point on Wonderland Road South (no word on what will become of this unit yet). We’ll also be watching to see what else goes in the White Oaks space. Westdell president Iyman Meddoui added: “The remainder of this space will be equally transformative, and we look forward to sharing more in the weeks ahead.” 

Read more: White Oaks Mall | CTV News London

Enbridge to consolidate SWO operations in former Costco

Enbridge Inc. has purchased the former south-end Costco on Wellington for $25.5 million, with plans to consolidate its London area Enbridge Gas operations there. The 11-acre site was sold last month, and will eventually house office staff, maintenance crews and warehousing following a renovation that’s expected to take a few years. “It’s a great, great deal for everybody,” CBRE’s vice president Kevin MacDougall told The London Free Press. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to bring more people to south London. It’s growth for the south end.” John Fyfe-Millar, the mayor’s chief of staff, added it was a “huge win,” and said the space will consolidate jobs from four other offices in the Southwestern Ontario region once renovations are complete. 

The upshot: One thing absent from this announcement is new jobs, likely because this is more of a consolidation than a major investment in new work. (Enbridge has around 1,000 employees in Southwestern Ontario, so it’s not nothing to bring them to town.) This will likely land as bad news in Chatham, which has been nervously watching since Enbridge announced a “facilities review” of its office there. But even while it’s more job relocation than job creation, it will be a nice boost for the south end and the local industrial economy, and will also produce spin-off jobs for construction and businesses that eventually pop up around the facility. 

Read more: London Free Press | CTV News London

What will government housing incentives do for London?

Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Doug Ford are hoping to jump start more homebuilding, announcing two major policy changes last week. The first, an expansion of the HST rebate, was announced two weeks ago, and was followed by the second — an $8.8-billion deal to fund housing-enabled infrastructure in cities that cut their development charges (DCs) by 50 per cent for three years — essentially telling cities they have room to cut fees, with upper levels of government committing funding to cover the gap. The moves are aimed at increasing the pace of homebuilding, which has been flagging as the entire housing market deals with a variety of economic headwinds. Mayor Josh Morgan, who has been floating his own schemes (albeit unsuccessfully) to cut DCs on new homes, was sounding positive about the plan, and expects London to be participating in the program. And homebuilders in London, who have been lobbying for policies like this for years, are even more positive about it. “Our developers will be taking advantage of this to try to reduce the entry-level costs of homes and make them much more affordable and attainable by the general public,” said the London Development Institute’s Mike Wallace, speaking with The London Free Press. “We think that will drive sales and will drive people who have been sitting on the sidelines thinking about new homes but just haven’t had the confidence to pull the trigger.”

The upshot: Estimates of how many new homes these policy changes will help build (the province said that the HST break will help build 8,000 new homes; the feds were more cautious and didn’t put a figure on it) should be taken as tentative, but there’s broad agreement that this should spur at least some building activity. “The combined effect of reducing development charges and increasing HST rebates could significantly lower the price of new homes, in some cases by hundreds of thousands of dollars,” wrote Ivey prof Mike Moffatt in the Toronto Star, pointing out that municipal development charges are a symptom of a larger problem — a widening infrastructure funding gap — that also needs attention if DCs are to be reduced in the long term. Others are watching out for what else this does to the housing market. Moffatt told The London Free Press one possible side effect of the policy might be to bring the price of resale homes down — great for buyers, less great for sellers. There’s others warning that buyers may not be seeing price drops all that quickly: a Better Dwelling report spoke to realtors who reported seeing some price hikes on new homes following the HST cut announcement, as builders looked to split the difference rather than pass on the entire rebate. When it comes to implementing DC cuts, cities will likely want to see transparency on where the savings are going to go; it was this question that was behind city council’s opposition to Morgan’s affordability incentive recently. “Right now, homebuyers are the scarce asset,” Moffatt told Canadian Mortgage Professional. “They’re what’s in short supply, so they should reap the largest share of the benefits.” 

Read more: London Free Press

JD Power nixes Western internships

Twenty-five Western students are scrambling after data analytics firm JD Power pulled their summer internship offers at the end of March, less than two months before students were set to start there, the students said. The firm has had a decades-long partnership with the school’s co-op program and has been a strong hiring destination for Western grads. “Everyone was panicking,” computer science student Jayansh Bagga told the Western Gazette. “JD Power was one of the biggest companies that hires from Western.” According to the company, the decision to cut the internships reflected shifts due to “AI, automation and changes in how we structure and deliver work,” which has led to “tempered” demand for entry-level workers. “This isn’t a reflection of the quality of candidates from Western or the value of co-op programs broadly, it’s a reflection of where our business is today and the kinds of roles we anticipate needing going forward aligned to our current strategy,” a company spokesperson said.

The upshot: Even if you’re confident that AI can help make remaining workers efficient enough to offset the work of 25 comp sci co-op students, the move does raise questions about whether JD Power, which has its London offices at Dundas and Talbot streets, might be doing more long-term damage to its hiring relationship with Western than the savings are worth here. Nevertheless, it is a reminder for weary computer grads that the tech market remains dismal at the entry level. The move has also exposed some friction between these tech grads, who rely on co-ops and internship programs to build experience, and the school itself, according to the Gazette, which reported that some students were unhappy with the school’s co-op department’s response, which included sending them dead job links and, in one case, chastising a student against publicizing the cancelled internships. 

Read more: Western Gazette | CBC News London

Push to upload stretch of Highbury Avenue to province intensifies

Talk of uploading responsibility for Highbury Avenue to the province is heating up as the city looks at a major rehabilitation project (pegged at around $27 million) for the expressway section of road between Hamilton Road and the 401, which is set to be much busier as the industrial sector in Elgin County and St. Thomas expands. The strongest signal yet that the road could be uploaded came from Elgin-Middlesex-London MPP Rob Flack, who told The London Free Press the road (which used to be a provincial highway) would be uploaded “sooner rather than later.” Flack added: “I think ultimately that needs to happen because it’s the main corridor of transportation, and as PowerCo builds out and Vianode comes in, and more businesses relocate along that corridor, it is only going to become busier.” In late March, city council endorsed a resolution to officially request the uploading; St. Thomas and Elgin County are expected to follow suit. “We’ve got to make it easy for people to get back and forth to work,” said St. Thomas mayor Joe Preston.

The upshot: Maybe you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t seen all the ads, but there are few things the current provincial government likes more than its reputation as a good steward of Ontario’s roads. Highbury isn’t the only road on their radar. In 2023, the province agreed to take over the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway from the City of Toronto, a move partially aimed at helping that city’s finance (and partially meant to buy their acquiescence on Ontario Place). There’s also been talk of uploading Highway 174 in Ottawa to the province as well. Neither process has been completed yet; both are in the due diligence phase. Highbury, with its proximity PowerCo, will likely be seen as a higher economic priority for the province (it also helps that the rehabilitation cost the province would take on is only pegged at $27 million, whereas Toronto and Ottawa’s highways needed $7.3 billion and $543 million, respectively). “Given this government’s focus on the economy and job creation, and its willingness to upload assets in other parts of the province, I think this is something that can make sense,” noted Mayor Josh Morgan. 

Read more: London Free Press

106.9: Spared the axe?

Fanshawe College’s radio station, 106.9 The X, may have a new suitor that will allow the station to stay on the air, a press release from the college suggests. Fanshawe said it has signed a memorandum of understanding with WeRise, the not-for-profit arm of YaYa’s Food Inc., owned and operated by Malvin and Maryam Wright, to “explore the future of the college’s broadcasting licence.” Much remains to be worked out beyond that, though. The school said only that “the non-binding agreement establishes a collaborative process to assess feasibility, guided by shared commitments to community service, public-interest broadcasting, cultural safety, equity and inclusion, and continued student learning opportunities,” and that WeRise still needs to find funding to “lead a comprehensive feasibility study” that will “inform any future governance or operational decisions.”

The upshot: A layman’s translation of the announcement might be that the school has signed an MOU with someone who maybe might be interested in taking the broadcast licence off Fanshawe’s hands and keep the station alive, if the numbers work out, at some point down the line. Not exactly salvation for the radio station (which saw its funding pulled by Fanshawe in October), but something, nonetheless. It’s also a bit of an odd partnership. The Wrights are much better known in the foodie scene as the operators of YaYa’s Kitchen, a global Black experience super club operating out of Museum London. For his part, Malvin Wright told CBC News London, “We saw [the radio station] as being a 50-year legacy asset, as part of this city. It has a deep history that is quite long and quite integrated within different communities across London, and we saw the opportunity. We think that we can do something different, something unique.” We’ll have to wait and see how this all pans out, but an unusual partnership may make for an unexpectedly good outcome for a radio station that was counting its days not that long ago.

Read more: CBC News London | Broadcast Dialogue

Dispatch: April 10, 2026

A summary of recent business appointments and announcements, plus event listings for the upcoming week.

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