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.
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.
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.
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.
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 facility, with a library branch and a YMCA under the same roof as the community centre. It stretches the capital dollars, keeps the building busy from morning to night, and lets a family make one trip instead of three.
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.