I've knocked on thousands of doors across our community, and the same concerns keep surfacing. Below are the issues you've raised most often, along with my position on each.
I will not support widening Wonderland Road. Staff now price it at $400 million to save drivers about two minutes by 2050, and their own analysis says the new lanes would clog again within years.
And $400 million is the starting number. London's last major road project, the Adelaide Street underpass, was pegged at $25 million when it was first studied in 2013. Council approved it at $58 million in 2018. It came in at $88 million. That's three and a half times the original estimate on a single rail crossing. Apply that track record to eight kilometres of Wonderland Road, with Thames River bridge widening and years of underground utility work that hasn't been fully priced, and this is a project that ends well north of half a billion dollars. That money and those years of construction should not go into asphalt through our neighbourhoods.
There's a faster, cheaper way to fix Wonderland now: targeted widening at key intersections only, turn lanes where traffic backs up, smart signals that adjust to real traffic, and emergency vehicle pre-emption at every light so fire trucks and ambulances get a green. Add queue-jump lanes and transit signal priority for buses, and park-and-ride for northwest commuters. These can be done intersection by intersection, for a fraction of the cost.
For the long term, the better answer is the one London keeps shelving: a northern bypass. Not on Fanshawe Park Road, and not on Sunningdale, both of which are now residential. Eight Mile Road, along the city's northern edge, is the right corridor. It sits outside city limits, so it can't be built by London alone. I'll push council to take the ring road talks it approved in 2025 and turn them into a real agreement with the province and Middlesex County, with a corridor study, a cost share, and a timeline.
Most people I talk to at the door don't know this: a community centre for northwest London is already in the City's Parks and Recreation Master Plan. It has been since Council adopted the plan in June 2019.
The plan calls for a mid-size, multi-use community centre in Northwest London, with an indoor pool, a large gymnasium, activity rooms, and multi-use space, to follow the Southeast London project. That project, the East Community Centre, opened in 2019. We're next in line. In 2024, the City's director of recreation and sport confirmed the next community centre build is in the northwest, with London's seventh indoor pool in it.
What the plan deliberately left open is the location, the timing, the final list of amenities, and whether the City partners with the YMCA, the library, or a school board, the model used at Bostwick and Stoney Creek.
I'll fight to build this as one true community hub, with four partners under the same roof as the community centre:
A library branch. Story time, homework help, quiet study space, and computers for people who don't have them at home, right down the hall from the pool and the gym.
A YMCA. Fitness, child care, and day camps that keep the building full from early morning to late evening.
A satellite police station. A visible, everyday police presence in the northwest, and a place to report something or talk to an officer without driving downtown. It also means a busy public building and parking lot that families feel safe using after dark.
An LTC park-and-ride lot. Park your car and catch the bus downtown or to Western and Fanshawe. Kids can get to swimming lessons on transit. And in the winter, you can wait for your bus indoors, warm, instead of standing beside a snowbank.
One building, four partners. It stretches the capital dollars, keeps the building busy from morning to night, and lets a family make one trip instead of five.
Adjacent major parallel roads cannot be worked on at the same time. Period. That's the heart of this plan. If Wonderland is under construction, Adelaide and Hyde Park stay open, and vice versa, so there's always one good way to get across town. To make that stick, everyone who digs up London's streets (the city, the utilities, the developers) sit at one table, share their plans a few years ahead, and work from one public map.
The second rule protects the roads once they're done: when the city repaves a road, that road stays fixed. No one gets to dig it up again for five years, except in a real emergency like a burst watermain. The city would publish a list of which streets are about to be repaved, so gas, hydro, and internet companies can do their digging before the new asphalt goes down instead of after. And if someone absolutely must cut into a freshly paved street, they pay for the damage and have to restore the full lane, not just slap a patch over the trench. If the dig could have been planned ahead and prevented, they face fines on top of that.
This all comes down to proactive planning and coordination. None of it requires new technology or big spending, just deciding the order of work before the shovels come out instead of after. Other cities already do most of this. London would just be the first to guarantee you always have a route home.
The list of Ontario cities that allow backyard hens keeps growing, while London has debated the question on and off since 2010. London does not need to invent anything here. It can simply copy policies that already work in neighbouring cities. It's time to catch up.
Cities that currently allow backyard hens include Kingston, Waterloo, Guelph, Niagara Falls, Brantford, and Halton Hills. London should adopt a blend of two of the strongest models: Halton Hills and Kitchener.
The first is Halton Hills' idea that a licence is earned, not just bought. Before a single hen arrives, the applicant must complete a short hen-care education step and pass a coop inspection. That front-loads the welfare and public-health knowledge and screens out impulse purchases.
The second is Kitchener's neighbour-consent mechanism, which solves the "not against my fence" objection. The default coop setback is 2.5 metres from the side and rear lot lines. If a lot is too small for that, the coop can go closer, but only with written consent from the immediately adjoining neighbours, and that consent is revocable. If a neighbour changes their mind, the coop has to move. It hands the veto to the person most affected, which is exactly where it belongs, and is why Kitchener's program has continued to stay successful.
Speed Bumps Aren't the Answer. Design Is.
The most common thing I hear on the doorstep in Ward 7 isn't taxes, and it isn't transit. It's the speed of the traffic on the street out front.
A few years ago, a car left the road and drove into my house. You don't forget the sound, or the time spent afterward thinking about what would have happened if someone had been standing where that car came to rest. It turned an abstract phrase, "dangerous speeds on residential streets," into something I have actually lived.
This is the doorstep version of a commitment I make in Priority 2: when we grow the city, we push more traffic, and more speed, onto the quiet residential streets in between. Calming those streets has to happen at the same time we widen the arterials, not five years of petitions later.
Here is the part people don't expect a candidate to say: the speed bump is usually the wrong tool.
London has already run this experiment. On Bruce Street in Wortley Village, speed bumps installed in 2016 cut average speed by only about 5 km/h, and residents reported drivers straddling the gaps or accelerating between them. Humps and bumps also jolt every driver whether they were speeding or not, slow down fire trucks and ambulances, and get in the way of the winter plow.
What actually holds speed down along a whole block is making drivers steer, not just brake. Chicanes, the gentle alternating curves formed by curb extensions, staggered parking, or planters, have brought operating speeds down by as much as 30 per cent, smoothly and without the jolt. They can be built cheaply from concrete or landscaped planters, piloted first with temporary materials, and placed so the plow still clears the street. Barrie already runs temporary planters and seasonal speed bumps that go in for the summer and come out in the fall for the plow. The trouble is that most of London's recent calming projects still default to speed bumps, and residents wait through a petition process to get anything at all.
Right now, getting anything done means gathering at least 10 signatures, filing a petition, and waiting through an investigation that, in the City's own words, does not always result in a measure at all. There should be a councillor-sponsored fast lane: if two councillors co-sign a request, it skips the petition and goes straight to the City's data collection and assessment. The safety review (speed data, street classification, the warrant) stays the same; what disappears is the months a neighbour spends door-knocking for signatures before the City will even look. When two members of Council agree a street needs examining, that is signal enough to start.
Residents in Ward 7 have told me they are seeing rats on their streets for the first time, and many connect it to garbage sitting out for two weeks through the hot summer months. This isn't only a Ward 7 concern. Council heard from neighbourhoods across London this year and endorsed a rat strategy over the summer that tightens property upkeep rules and lets residents report rat sightings through Service London.
I propose a targeted response that builds on the City's strategy. When rat sightings reported to the City are confirmed by bylaw officers, two things would happen in the surrounding area at the same time. First, garbage pickup would move to weekly until the problem is resolved, then return to biweekly. Second, bylaw officers would carry out a property standards sweep of the same area, so that the things that feed and shelter rats, such as unsecured garbage, debris and overgrown lots, are dealt with together.
The City's strategy focuses on property upkeep, and that matters. But enforcement takes time, and garbage sitting at the curb for two weeks in summer heat doesn't help in a neighbourhood that already has rats. Doing both at once tackles the food and the shelter together.
CTV News: Rat reporting made easier for London neighbourhoods struggling with infestations
CTV News: CARFAX London offices aim to relocate to Westmount
When London's unemployment is among the worst in the country, you don't turn away 800 jobs to promote downtown.
CARFAX Canada is one of London's real tech success stories. It grew here, hires here, and built out its head office at 100 Kellogg Lane. Now it wants to consolidate and relocate to Westmount Commons, and a City policy that steers large offices into the downtown core has put that move in doubt. Council is split. Roughly 800 local jobs are caught in the middle of the debate.
The downtown-office policy is not a bad idea. Concentrating office workers in the core supports transit ridership, keeps lunchtime foot traffic and storefronts alive, and protects the tax base of the part of the city every Londoner shares. On a healthy day, in a healthy labour market, it is a defensible long-term goal. But the policy was written for a different economy than the one we are in.
Here is the economy we are actually in. London's unemployment rate hit 9.1 per cent in March 2026 and 9.2 per cent in April, the highest of any major city in Canada. It has come down for two straight months since, to 8.2 per cent in June. That is real progress and it is worth saying out loud. But 8.2 per cent still sits well above Ontario at 7.0 per cent and Canada at 6.5 per cent, and it still ranks among the highest big-city rates in the country. This is a city that has lost thousands of jobs in a single year. It is not a city with jobs to spare.
Promoting downtown is a goal. Keeping 800 jobs inside London is a plan. When those two things collide, the plan wins. You get to be choosy about where jobs sit once you have enough of them. We are not there yet. Force the choice today and there is nothing that keeps CARFAX from consolidating in a neighbouring municipality instead, and those jobs leave London entirely. That is the opposite of what the downtown policy is trying to protect.
And there is an honest reason employers and workers hesitate about the core, one this platform already names in Priority 4: people do not want to be downtown while the homelessness, safety, and cleanliness issues there go unaddressed. You do not fix that by using a zoning rule to trap employers in a place they are trying to leave. You fix it by making the core somewhere people choose to be. Until then, a policy that says "downtown or nowhere" mostly gets you nowhere.
Residents in Ward 7 have told me they want to follow what council is deciding, but when they open an agenda they find hundreds of pages of staff reports written for engineers, planners and lawyers. This isn't only a Ward 7 concern, and other cities have already acted on it. Winnipeg adopted a Plain Language Policy in 2023 that requires the summary of every report to council to be written at a grade 8 reading level, and Vaughan directed staff in 2015 to add a short plain-language synopsis to complex reports.
I propose a Simple Language Policy that builds on those models. Every staff report to council or committee would open with a short Simple Language box at the very top, and two things would make it stick. First, the box would answer four plain questions in 150 words or less, at a grade 8 reading level: what the report is about, what council is being asked to decide, what it will cost, and what it means for residents. Second, the City Clerk would send back any report that arrives without one, so the summary becomes a standard part of every report rather than an optional extra.
London's staff reports are thorough, and that matters. But detail doesn't help if residents can't find the decision inside it, and few people have time to read forty pages to get there. A plain summary at the top keeps all the technical work intact and lets residents weigh in before the vote instead of reading about it after.