IKEA Winnipeg – ‘Not a done deal just yet’?
Will IKEA Winnipeg be another IKEA Dublin – Doomed?
Amid all the public excitement over Ikea’s Winnipeg plan is a danger that those high expectations have so far to fall.
Considering this city’s record on infrastructure renewal and paving the way for development, that risk is very real. The international home furnishings retail giant’s arrival here is certainly not a done deal, as long as more than $20 million in street expansions and traffic signal improvements are necessary for the chain to open its proposed 350,000-square-foot outlet within three years.
While the city and province speak confidently about giving Ikea Canada the infrastructure it needs, the company’s chosen site at Kenaston Boulevard and Sterling Lyon Parkway is in a district seemingly symbolic of intergovernmental bumbling, disagreement and delay. Remember the Doer government’s years of stalling on Kenaston’s $38-million underpass at Wilkes Avenue during city hall’s efforts to get it done? How about the city’s amusing trumpeting last year of the very same south Route 90 as an example of its supposedly speedy progress to allegedly synchronize signal lights?
And we’re to expect that a widening of Kenaston is so easy in light of these stumbles, and while we continue to wait for Ottawa — after five years or so — to say anything at all about what will become of the massive, vacant Kapyong Barracks? Throw in a requirement for a change to Plan Winnipeg — a cumbersome document if ever there were one — and the hype over Ikea’s hopes here poses better prospects of a letdown than the Save the Jets Campaign in 1995.
And we all know how that turned out.
For Mayor Sam Katz and Premier Gary Doer, this situation is ripe for their embarrassment and for their constituents’ outrage — particularly because Winnipeg’s fiercely small-town, anti-development attitude gives no such major ultra-urban project an easy green light.
“As much as they say they’re coming, I don’t ever believe they actually will,” Jo-Anna Watts, one Winnipeg consumer, wisely said of Ikea after the firm’s announcement.
And University of Manitoba business analyst Rob Warren, who has long questioned Ikea’s viability in Winnipeg, says he’s not changing his opinion “until I see a shovel in the ground.” This is the beginning of a development covering 1.5 million square feet, in a city that makes three-storey apartment buildings and tiny strip malls a massive undertaking amid a fuss of acrimony and finger-pointing.
We’re not even at the public open house stage. And Ikea’s largest Canadian superstore is on its way here?
Sure it is — when we see not only a shovel in the ground but its doors wide open.
[Via Winnipeg Sun]
See also:
Despite hype, locals seem somewhat ‘meh’ about IKEA coming to Manitoba
What do you think? Are you excited about IKEA in Winnipeg? Do you think it will actually happen? Will the current state of the faltering economy impact IKEA’s plans to build in Winnipeg?
