Karen Rittinger doesn’t know what to do. The retired student counsellor worries about the extreme weather and economic insecurity that faces Canada’s youth.
Ms. Rittinger would like to support NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, but fears that splitting the progressive vote could benefit the Conservatives, “and I would do anything to stop Andrew Scheer from becoming the next prime minister of Canada.” She is an Anybody But Conservative voter.
We are having this conversation on the ION, Waterloo Region’s brand-new light rail transit. The last stop on the line is at the Fairview Park mall, where Davy Deonarine has a few minutes to talk in between serving customers at a jewellery store.
Mr. Deonarine worries about jobs and growth, which is why Mr. Scheer has his vote. “The Conservatives are more tightly wound around the economy,” he believes.
Waterloo Region has emerged as a key bellwether in federal elections. Every riding within the region – which encompasses the cities of Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge, plus several rural townships – went Conservative in the 2011 election that delivered Stephen Harper a majority government. Four years later, four out of five ridings swung Liberal, helping Justin Trudeau secure a majority government.
“It’s a mini 905,” says Barry Kay, a political scientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo who does seat projections for the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy. He’s referring to the region outside Toronto, named after its area code, that also tends to vote as a block for whatever party ends up forming government.
Canada’s future is bound to what is known as the Toronto-Waterloo Region Corridor, second only to California’s Silicon Valley as a North American technology hub. Waterloo Region, the western anchor, is home to 601,000 people, its economy anchored by BlackBerry, OpenText and Google, and by the University of Waterloo, one of Canada’s top research universities. The region also hosts a phalanx of well-supported next-gen firms, while manufacturing, including those that work in the automotive sector, remains a major employer.
The City of Kitchener estimates that 10,000 more people commute daily from the Greater Toronto Area to Waterloo Region than the other way around, almost all of them tech workers.
“We are on the cusp of remarkable things happening in this 20-year-overnight-success story,” says Iain Klugman, president of Communitech, a non-profit incubator of startups.
A region that was scarred by past boom-and-bust traumas – the collapse of the dot-com bubble; BlackBerry’s travails – is maturing into a multi-generational universe of rapidly growing companies, proliferating startups, angel investors and experienced entrepreneurs.
“In every dimension, we are getting better,” Mr. Klugman believes.
So what concerns voters in this burgeoning hub of the Next Canada? In a day spent hanging out on the ION and at the local mall, voters talked about the environment, the economy, transportation concerns – roads and highways are chronically clogged; the region desperately needs improved train service with Toronto – and housing costs that are spiralling toward unaffordable. No one mentioned the scandals that have dogged Mr. Trudeau, from the India trip to the SNC-Lavalin affair to the brownface photos.
“It comes up, but it’s [part of] a greater conversation,” said Waterloo riding Liberal candidate Bardish Chagger, who served as House Leader in the government. She believes voters will send her back to Ottawa, based on what people are telling her when she canvasses door-to-door.
Her Conservative challenger, Jerry Zhang, says he hears something quite different at the door.
“It’s affordability and the cost of living,” he says. “People are working harder and harder, but they’ve still got bills to pay … some people told me they have to cut their vacation just to make ends meet.”
On Oct. 21, will the region once again vote mostly as a block for whichever turns out to be the winning party? Perhaps not. Prof. Kay observes that the ridings of Waterloo and Kitchener Centre have large populations of academics – with more than 65,000 postsecondary students attending U of W, WLU and Conestoga College, education is a major employer in the region – and may be settling into the sort of Liberal-versus-NDP contests found in downtown Toronto and Ottawa. Both ridings went NDP in last year’s provincial election.
Meanwhile, suburban Cambridge and Kitchener South-Hespeler are shaping up as 905-like contests between Conservatives and Liberals. Kitchener-Conestoga, which includes rural townships, stayed Conservative in 2015, though as the riding suburbanizes, it becomes more flippable.
(In nearby Guelph, a similarly tech-oriented city, the Green Party won in the recent provincial election, though Prof. Kay expects it to remain Liberal federally.)
With less than three weeks to go until voting day, all the campaigns are targeting people like Tony Katic, who works in home renovation. “They’re all neck-and-neck for me,” he said. He sees Mr. Trudeau as an experienced leader, likes the Conservative emphasis on pocketbook issues and admires the NDP’s focus on the environment.“ That’s a big concern for Canada and the world,” he says.
The rest of Canada will be watching for Mr. Katic and others like him in Waterloo Region to finally decide.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story said Barry Kay heads the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy. In fact, he is an affiliate member of the institute.
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John Ibbitson