The Canary in the Forest City

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I’ve lived in London my whole life. I’ve watched it change over the years, but nothing like what’s happening now.

I know what it looked like when the Galleria was bustling and full of life. I was around when you could buy a house in the south end without a bidding war. I remember when a London job was a London job, something stable, something you could plan a family around. And right now, in the spring of 2026, I’m watching something happen to this city that I never expected to see.

London is in the worst economic shape of any major city in Canada. Literally. Not Toronto. Not Winnipeg. London.

The Numbers Aren’t Abstract

Our unemployment rate hit 9.2% in April. That’s the highest figure for any large city in this country. It didn’t spike suddenly. It’s been climbing for nine straight months, one month at a time, grinding upward like a slow emergency.¹

In the first four months of this year alone, the London region lost roughly 13,000 jobs: about 5,000 in January, over 3,000 in February, over 3,000 in March, and another 1,800 in April.² Think about what 13,000 jobs means in a city our size. These aren’t statistics in a federal briefing note. These are our neighbours, our relatives, people we see at Tim Hortons, at the grocery store, and at the gym. People who are now quietly panicking.

London isn’t some resource town built around a single mine or a single plant. This is a university city, a hospital city, a city with serious manufacturing, logistics, and financial services. If a place with that kind of diversified economic base bleeds 13,000 jobs in four months, something’s gone badly wrong, and it started long before any tariff was announced.

The Debt Crisis Nobody’s Talking About Loudly Enough

The unemployment rate’s the headline. What’s happening underneath is worse.

Across Canada in the first quarter of 2026, more than 37,000 people filed for bankruptcy or entered a consumer proposal. The highest total since 2009. Ontario led the country, with consumer insolvencies up nearly 15% year-over-year and personal bankruptcies up more than 25%.³ Local insolvency filings here in London are running ahead of even that grim provincial pace, with trustees saying plainly that costs are rising faster than incomes, and have been for a long time.⁴

This is a structural condition. Canada’s household debt-to-income ratio sat at 173.1% at the end of 2025, meaning Canadians owed roughly $1.73 for every dollar of disposable income they earned, and that ratio’s risen for five consecutive quarters.⁵ Wages haven’t kept pace. They never did. For years, borrowing filled the gap between what people earned and what life actually cost, and now the bill’s coming due all at once.

Walk through the southwest end right now and look at the for-sale signs. Some of those listings are normal life moves. Others are forced moves, families running the renewal math at the kitchen table and getting out before it crushes them. People who bought during the 2020-2021 frenzy at near-zero interest rates are now hitting their five-year renewals at dramatically higher rates. Roughly 1.15 million Canadian households are renewing their mortgages this year, and five-year fixed renewers are facing average payment increases of 15 to 20 percent.⁶ Ontario’s mortgage delinquency rate’s at its highest level since 2016, with 90+ day delinquencies climbing more than 90% year-over-year provincially.⁷ CMHC data shows London’s mortgage delinquency rate’s more than doubled since 2020.⁸ It’s being swept under the rug.

What Happened to the Escape City

For a generation, London was where Canadians landed when everywhere else got too expensive. When the GTA priced you out, you moved here. You skipped Kitchener, kept driving west, and found something rare: a city with good bones that you could still afford. Hospitals, Western, Fanshawe, reasonable housing, a community that felt like a real city without the big-city misery.

People moved here for that reason. And that influx was real and good for us. But it also drove prices up. Our housing costs climbed. Our rentals climbed. And the underlying economic model was the same one driving the national debt spiral: consumer borrowing substituting for real wage growth, paper wealth from rising home values standing in for actual productivity, and the appearance of prosperity masking the fragility underneath. When you build a local economy on those foundations, and the interest rate cycle turns, the affordability that drew people here in the first place disappears fast.

That’s what happened. The escape city got caught in the same trap as everywhere else, just later.

Manufacturing and the Tariff Problem

Southwestern Ontario’s always been a manufacturing region. London’s no exception. Advanced manufacturing accounts for roughly 9% of London’s total workforce, and well over 12% when counted as part of the broader London economic region.⁹ Automotive parts, machinery, food processing, medical devices: real industries, substantial output, and right now, under heavy pressure.

London Machinery, one of this city’s oldest industrial employers at over 120 years in operation, announced layoffs and shifted production to a U.S. facility earlier this year to get out from under 25% tariffs on Canadian-made goods. With the majority of their output sold into the American market, the math left them no choice.¹⁰ The Ontario Financial Accountability Office projected that U.S. tariffs could cost this province over 119,000 jobs in 2026, with London flagged among the hardest-hit communities outside of Windsor.¹¹

This didn’t have to unfold the way it did. The federal and provincial governments had opportunities to negotiate competently, to manage the relationship with the United States in a way that protected Canadian workers. Instead, they managed it in a way that stoked the conflict and then reached for the cheque book when the damage was already done. A $20 million federal relief fund for London-area businesses is a bandage on a wound that goes down to the bone.¹² It doesn’t re-employ 13,000 people, stop a bankruptcy filing, or cover a mortgage shortfall. It’s what you do when you’ve run out of real answers.

We’re Looking Forward Through the Rear-View Mirror

Here’s the part that should concern us most.

Everything described above is what already happened. Unemployment data’s months old by the time it reaches a headline. Insolvency filings reflect debts accumulated over years. Delinquency rates tell you what broke down last quarter. Economists who study rate shock cycles note that delinquencies typically lag the trigger event by twelve to twenty-four months, meaning the full weight of the 2025-2026 mortgage renewal wave may not show up in the data until 2027.¹³ We’re reading yesterday’s news and calling it analysis.

The leading indicators, new business formations, investment commitments, consumer confidence, hiring plans, aren’t flashing green. Which means the full picture of what’s happening in London in 2026 is still being assembled. What we’re seeing now is the echo of pain that began months ago.

I grew up here. I’ve watched London through good stretches and hard ones. What I’m watching right now is different. The warning signs are present in enough places, across enough sectors, that London isn’t just experiencing a rough quarter. London’s showing Canada what happens when an economy gets built on housing speculation, debt-fuelled consumption, and deferred productivity, and then the props start giving way.

The question for those of us who live here is what we do about the levers we actually control. The city can’t set interest rates. The city doesn’t sign trade deals. But the city sets property taxes, determines where money gets spent, and chooses whether its policies make life easier or harder for the people and businesses already fighting to stay afloat. At a minimum, London’s city council should be running as lean as possible right now. Every dollar squeezed from a Londoner’s wallet right now is a dollar that family can’t spend on groceries, on rent, on getting back on their feet.

I’m not interested in managing decline. I want to see London flourish. And that starts with being honest about where we are.

If this piece resonated, read it on Substack and subscribe to get future ones in your inbox. Statistics cited from Statistics Canada, the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, the Canadian Association of Insolvency and Restructuring Professionals (CAIRP), CMHC, Equifax Canada, the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario, CBC News, CTV News, and the City of London’s own economic reporting. Figures current as of May 2026.