[Blitz]

This article is written by the editorial board of the Windsor Star. It's interesting to hear how this news is being covered in other locations (i.e. it seems few people realize that St. Thomas is a major problem but it's never mentioned). I voted for Fontana but I still don't know what to think of him...he deserves more time I guess. Good that they didn't leave DeCicco-Best off the hook though.


London's Numbers
Mayor needs jobs strategy
Aug. 12, 2011

London Mayor Joe Fontana is holding an emergency summit today to try to figure out how to bring more jobs to his hard-hit city. Late last week the metropolitan London area earned the dubious distinction of having the highest unemployment rate in Canada; a spot held by Windsor for the last two years. If Windsor was stunned to learn it had lost its No. 1 ranking, London was even more shocked to discover it had won the title with an unemployment rate of 9.1 per cent in July. Windsor’s rate had dropped to eight per cent.

That led Fontana to summon everyone from business and labour leaders to politicians to a roundtable meeting designed to brainstorm solutions. “We need to take a scan of where we are at in different sectors and look at what we can do, along with the federal and provincial government, to get over this hump for 2011,” he told the London Free Press. Fontana went on to say he was “not so concerned about our future, but there is no doubt that results like 9.1 per cent causes us all to gasp and say in the short term, there are head winds we are facing.”

That last statement shows just how differently two mayors approach the same problem. Windsor Mayor Eddie Francis is always concerned about the city’s future, which is why he’s scoured the world in search of diversification opportunities. There’s no “short-term” thinking when it comes to finding ways to stabilize our local economy. Francis doesn’t wait for investment to come knocking. He goes out and woos it. Perhaps that’s because Windsor is used to the boom-and-bust cycle that has dogged us for decades, thanks to our dependence on the auto industry.

We know what it’s like to be the first in for every recession, and Francis, along with a strong city council, has made it a mission to bring in new industries to cushion those blows. London has, traditionally, been a white-collar town with a stable economy built on well-paying government, insurance and banking jobs.

Francis didn’t exactly offer Fontana friendly advice when he saw the StatsCan figures, but he did respond to the situation this way: “We’ve been there and we don’t want to go back,” he said. “But when our rate was climbing, we made some very strategic decisions. We could have buried our heads in the sand and waited it out, but instead we decided to reposition this region for future growth.” That included doing what was needed “to make Windsor more attractive to outside investment.”

Fontana is new to the job, having snatched the mayor’s chair away from Anne Marie DeCicco-Best in October. She’d held that post for 10 years, and some could say that it was during her tenure that things began to slip. When unemployment rose for 10 straight months in 2009, DeCicco-Best responded to the news by blaming senior levels of government for not helping London enough.

“London is threatening to become the land that recovery forgot,” Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist for BMO Capital Markets, said at the time. So there were clearly signs that in the aftermath of the 2008 global meltdown, a strategy was needed. It just didn’t seem to materialize. This isn’t intended to come across as gloating. Windsor knows all too well that circumstances can change in an instant. We also know how important it is for every city in southwestern Ontario to be economically healthy.

But Fontana has a long road ahead of him, and the problems can’t be solved through summits. He needs to get out there and pound the pavement. He needs to sell his city.