Kitchener Centre, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Kitchener Centre

Kitchener Centre gathered the downtown and the north-central and northeastern neighbourhoods of the city — Victoria Park and the civic district, Rockway, the Auditorium, Stanley Park, Centreville-Chicopee, Heritage Park and Idlewood. It sat in the middle of Waterloo Region, on the Highway 401 corridor about an hour west of Toronto, in a city whose industrial past and technological present were visible within a few blocks of each other.

Candidates

Stephen Woodworth (Conservative) — Woodworth was born in Kitchener in 1954 and practised law there. His first candidacy came in 1988, when he ran as a Liberal in the neighbouring riding of Waterloo and finished second to Progressive Conservative Walter McLean. In 1994 he was elected to the Waterloo Catholic District School Board representing Kitchener and served on it until 2003. He came to the 2008 campaign as the Conservative candidate in a seat his party had not held.

Karen Redman (Liberal) — Redman was born in Kitchener in 1953 and graduated from the University of Waterloo in 1974 with a degree in English, working afterwards as a writer. She served as a trustee on the Waterloo County Board of Education from 1988 to 1994 and then on Kitchener city council until 1997, when she was first elected to the House of Commons. She was parliamentary secretary to the Minister of the Environment from 2000 to 2003 and was named Chief Government Whip on 20 July 2004. After the 2006 election she became Chief Opposition Whip, and she held that post through the 39th Parliament.

Oz Cole-Arnal (NDP) — Cole-Arnal came to Canada in 1975 to take up a professorship in church history at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary on the Wilfrid Laurier campus. He wrote several books on the French worker-priest movement and on liberation theology, among them Priests in Working Class Blue and To Set the Captives Free. Outside the classroom he was a familiar presence in anti-poverty organising and trade union campaigns across Waterloo Region, and had co-founded the Alliance Against Poverty.

John Bithell (Green Party) — Bithell, a manager living in Kitchener, ran for the Greens.

Amanda Lamka ran as an Independent, and Martin Suter, a truck driver who had also been the party's candidate here in 2006, ran for the Communist Party.

About the Riding

Kitchener's older economy was built on leather, rubber, furniture, food processing and auto parts, and much of that base had been contracting sharply. Waterloo Region carried more manufacturing employment than the Canadian average, which left it disproportionately exposed as offshore competition grew and the Canadian dollar climbed to parity; the automotive slump of that autumn added further pressure.

Running against that was the region's technology sector. Research In Motion, headquartered in neighbouring Waterloo, had expanded quickly, and firms including Open Text and Dalsa drew graduates out of the engineering and computer science programs at the University of Waterloo and the business school at Wilfrid Laurier. That prosperity accumulated more visibly in Waterloo than in central Kitchener.

Downtown renewal was the city's answer to that imbalance. Kitchener committed land and $30 million to a University of Waterloo health sciences campus at King and Victoria streets, where ground was broken in March 2006; the new School of Pharmacy admitted its first class in January 2008 and was still teaching on the Waterloo campus while the downtown building went up. The Kitchener Market, Victoria Park and the old industrial buildings of the Tannery district framed the same effort.

The final week of the campaign coincided with Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest, held each year around Thanksgiving, which put every candidate in the same halls and tents. Beyond the economy, the questions that recurred were the carbon-tax proposal, funding for post-secondary research, affordable housing in the central neighbourhoods, and the regional debate over a rapid transit line.