Kitchener and Waterloo are like twins, so let’s merge

When I moved here more than 30 years ago, Kitchener and Waterloo called themselves the Twin Cities.

But they didn’t seem to be alike at all.

There was “lunch bucket” Kitchener, where people went to work in factories that made things. Tires, car parts, and of course pork products at Schneiders on Courtland Avenue, from which the odour of hotdogs seeped throughout the neighbourhood on a steamy summer.

Next door was Waterloo, which had fewer factories and more classrooms than its twin. Even back then, Waterloo’s two universities dominated its culture. University of Waterloo had pioneered co-op education and had a policy that its professors could profit from their own research. So Waterloo had many spinoff companies, the most famous of which was Research In Motion.

Local historian Ken McLaughlin explained it this way: “One of the twins went to university and developed in his teenage years into a leading professional and the other twin went to trade school and chose a trade that once had been respected, but that has gone out of style.”

By “out of style,” McLaughlin was referring to the collapse of traditional manufacturing that has blighted southern Ontario and crashed particularly hard in Kitchener. The Schneiders factory pumped out its last roll of bologna in 2015. The huge Budd Automotive factory is long gone. Tires aren’t made here any more.

But Kitchener, enterprising as it is, soon got back up on its feet. Maybe, its leaders thought, the city could be more like that successful twin.

When Carl Zehr became of Kitchener in 1997, one of the first things he did was to lobby the universities to extend their campuses to downtown Kitchener.

Under Zehr’s watch, Kitchener put together an Economic Development Investment Fund worth $110 million over 10 years. It would help build the University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy, the Wilfrid Laurier School of Social Work, and the Communitech Hub. These helped draw other developments.

Today, Waterloo councillors marvel at the spectacular entrance to downtown Kitchener travelling along King Street from their city. Kitchener’s core is replete with gleaming highrises and beautiful repurposed old buildings that project both the past and the future.

Now that the two cities are more like actual twins, it will be easier to merge their governments, McLaughlin says.

This is important. Premier Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservative government has left little doubt that amalgamation of Waterloo Region will be very likely in the near future.

It may or may not actually save money to collapse our three cities and four townships into one huge supercity with fewer mayors and elected officials. But it gives the impression of a lean, streamlined, easy-to-understand public service.

Leaders in Cambridge — which is the most experienced in all this, after the merge of Hespeler, Preston and Galt in 1973 — are concerned that their city will lose its voice if the region amalgamates. Ditto for the townships.

Nothing about amalgamation will be easy. But the easiest part is merging Kitchener and Waterloo. Unless we want the job done for us, we should be talking about it, and setting up a plan to make it happen.