London’s Job Summit: We can dig a grave. Can we climb out?

[What is London, Ontario? “It’s a low, wide city several degrees hotter than surrounding forests and farmland, built in sprawling, extravagant fashion when fossil fuels were cheap.” G. Harrison, Londoner, July 28]

Tomorrow, Mayor Joe Fontana will preside over an emergency summit involving some business leaders, politicians and interested parties that will brainstorm solutions to our city’s jobless crisis.

The mayor and many others now realize that with unemployment at 9.1 per cent, the highest rate of a major Canadian city (the number employed is down 3.5% over last year with reportedly 8,300 fewer people employed), if something isn’t done now to fill the hole we will not only appear to be standing in our own grave but making it deeper.


["I kin dig a hole so deep you can't get out."]

Unfortunately, I feel the summit will fail to reverse the grave-deepening trend if local politicians and business leaders adopt one of Mayor Fontana’s mantras, i.e., that it’s only a short-term problem, that if we can get over this jobless hump we can return to business as usual.

Fontana says we need to “get over this hump for 2011,” that he’s “not so concerned about our future, but... 9.1% (unemployment) causes us all to gasp and say in the short term, there are headwinds we are facing.”

Though I appreciate his confidence and enthusiasm, feigned or otherwise, I think we need to bear the long term in mind, especially now that the ground upon which we stand is sinking.

For several decades London has been growing far, fat and wide - in pursuit of the culture of big - on the back of cheap oil. Many citizens of this fair town have made a show of prosperity with bigger properties, homes, closets, cars, pools and countless material possessions while household, provincial, national and global debt has been growing deeper.

For a dozen decades or more, many cities and countries have become accustomed to growing productivity on the back of finite resources, e.g., petroleum, wood and metals.

Ron Wright, in A Short History of Progress, describes our prosperity in this manner:

“We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our two-century bubble of freedom and affluence as normal and inevitable... Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half a planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels. In the New World, the West hit the biggest bonanza of all time.”


["I'm jist lookin' fer the right way to turn."]

Many citizens and businesses have grown prosperous, even excessively so, and visible signs of increasing wealth (the big houses, cars, closets, computers, etc.) are commonplace, as is associated debt.

Now, trapped by the trappings of the big lifestyle they desire and somehow feel entitled to, many countries and cities face the long term battle of not getting buried in a grave of their own making.

Will a frozen pizza factory on the 401 bail London out? Are more companies like it the answer? Is a stimulus package that will return us to ‘business as usual’ the way to go?

I think not. The Corporation of the City of London needs to make a fundamental shift away from the culture of big.

In my opinion, one part of the answer will be found where some business minds (especially in the home construction industry) would least expect it - inside an 800 square foot house.

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