Skip to content

The Forest City Capitalist: The BIA Killed Downtown

This evening, I took a walk through two areas of London, Ontario's downtown. One area is known as "Richmond Row" and the other is known as the "downtown core".

Richmond Row is a bright, clean, and vibrant shopping area. I encountered no panhandlers or suspicious acting people. It wasn't busy on a Tuesday evening, but people were out at the restaurants and shops. Richmond Row is only a short distance from the downtown core.

Walking through the downtown core, the first thing I noticed is how down-at-the-heel it looks. Dirty and dingy. The street lamps were not even on. The vacant store fronts, and the junk paper posters stapled to just about everything. I had to navigate the crowd of people standing on the sidewalk waiting the next city bus out of the downtown core. I passed one or two odd behaving people, and, of course, because it happens almost everytime I am in the core, I was asked for spare change by some stranger.

So why the differences in the two areas that are located so close together? The answer is London's downtown core has had a Business Improvement Area (BIA) for about 30 years, and Richmond Row doesn't have a BIA. It is that simple. BIAs kill business.

A BIA is forced association where merchants have no voting rights. It is taxation without representation. BIAs are totalitarian. How much money has been taxed and then burned in the downtown core over the past 30 years? I am guessing billions. I have lived downtown almost 12 years. It is still a hole.

© Trevor Dailey

Freedom Party Of Ontario: Flyer: BIAs Are Hazardous

Downtown London [BIA] to Make $540K Ask at City Hall Today

 

Computer Hard Times

'The American Dream' Dusty Rhodes is a deceased professional wrestler who was one of the best in the business. One thing Rhodes is famous for is his outstanding 'promos', as they are called in the professional wrestling business. One of those promos from 1985 is today know as the 'Hard Times' promo. Done completely ad-lib, unlike today's scripted professional wrestling promos, Rhodes delivers a golden promo where he speaks the words:

"And hard times are when a man has worked at a job 30 years! 30 years! They give him a watch, kick him in the butt, and say, 'Hey, a computer took your place, daddy!' That's hard times!"

How times have changes. Not just in the world of professional wrestling, but also in the real world. It took less than 2 hours for me to receive an email that my application for a job had been rejected. No, a computer didn't take my job, a computer denied me a job.

© Trevor Dailey

"I done f***ing mining. I done hard rock mining. I done f***in copper mining and f***ing gold mining. Yeah. Ha, ha, ha, ha!. I was one of the toughest in the f***ing west." - 'Tommy The Miner', introduction voice to the song 'Hard Luck Town' by the Killer Dwarfs.

 

 

 

 

The Deceptive Unemployment Rate

If one looks at the current unemployment rate for London, Ontario, and area, one might conclude that with such a low unemployment rate jobs are everywhere. Employers must be scrambling to find workers because a low unemployment rate means the number of people looking for work is low. This is not correct.

The reason the area unemployment rate is at the lowest it has been in years is because of the inaccurate way Statistics Canada determines the "unemployment rate". What has happened is the unemployment rate has declined drastically because so many people without work are no longer being counted as "unemployed". For example, a person who has exhausted his or her "Employment Insurance" benefits is no longer counted as "unemployed". A person who does not meet the Statistics Canada definition of "unemployed" when answering a survey is not "unemployed". Many people who are out of work are not even known to Statistics Canada.

More than one of the very few employers who contacted me after the seemingly hundreds of jobs I have applied for have mentioned to me they have been "overwhelmed" with applications. They had no idea they would receive so many applications. One employer mentioned to me during a recent job interview the large number of "overqualified" applicants for the part-time position the company was looking to fill. Applicants with "multiple University degrees" applying for a job that requires only a high school education. One employer stopped reviewing applications after only a few days because there were so many. A low unemployment rate does not mean more employment.  

© Trevor Dailey

EI Economic Region of London (Ontario, Canada)

Employment and unemployment

Local Jobless Rate Falls