Kitchener—Waterloo, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Kitchener—Waterloo

The seat covered all of the City of Waterloo together with the northern portion of Kitchener, the dividing line running west to east along Highland Road West, Fischer-Hallman Road and a Canadian National rail line. Inside it sat two universities, a cluster of research institutes, and the head office of the company that had made the region's name.

Candidates

Peter Braid (Conservative) — Braid was making his first run for Parliament. Born in Kitchener in 1964, he studied at the University of Waterloo and graduated from the University of Toronto in 1989 with a degree in international relations. He began on the staff of the Immigration and Refugee Board, assigned to the constituency office of Walter McLean, then the area's Progressive Conservative MP, and went on to work as a communications consultant, at Sun Life Financial and at Quarry Integrated Communications in Waterloo. He sat on the city's economic development committee and on the board of the local Conservative riding association.

Andrew Telegdi (Liberal) — The sitting member, Telegdi had represented the area since 1993 and was seeking a sixth term. Born in Budapest in 1946, he left Hungary with his family after the 1956 revolution and reached Canada the following year. He ran the agency Youth in Conflict with the Law before sitting on Waterloo city council and representing the city regionally from 1985 to 1993. Appointed parliamentary secretary for immigration in July 1998, he resigned the post in May 2000 over provisions permitting citizenship to be revoked without a court hearing, and in 2004 was briefly parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Paul Martin for Aboriginal affairs. By 2008 he was vice-chair of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration and among the most persistent advocates for the so-called lost Canadians, whose status was addressed by Bill C-37, given royal assent in April 2008.

Cindy Jacobsen (NDP) — Jacobsen worked as a pastor and a therapist in Waterloo.

Cathy MacLellan (Green Party) — MacLellan grew up in Neustadt and came to Waterloo in the early 1980s to study health at the University of Waterloo, returning to the region in 1996. She helped start Arise Technologies, a Waterloo firm making solar cells and panels, and has said her turn to Green politics followed time spent in Germany.

Jason Cousineau stood for the Libertarian Party, Kyle James Huntingdon for the Canadian Action Party and Ramon Portillo for the Communist Party, along with independent candidate Mark Corbiere.

About the Riding

Research In Motion, founded in Waterloo in 1984, was the defining private employer and in the autumn of 2008 was near the height of its commercial run. Its success had pulled venture capital, contract firms and start-ups into the blocks around the University of Waterloo campus, whose co-operative education program placed students with firms across North America. Wilfrid Laurier University sat a few blocks away. Research institutes gave the city a further layer: the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics stood a short walk from uptown Waterloo, and the Institute for Quantum Computing, launched in 2002 on a personal donation from Mike Lazaridis, moved into a new building in the university's Research and Technology Park during 2008. Sun Life Financial and Manulife anchored the older, financial half of the economy.

Transit was a live municipal file with a federal dimension: in May 2004 Ottawa, Queen's Park and the Region of Waterloo committed up to $2.5 million toward technical studies and an environmental assessment for a light rail line linking the two cities, and that work was still under way. Immigration and citizenship carried unusual weight because of the sitting member's committee work, and the September market collapse landed mid-campaign in a riding resting on technology exports, financial services and university research.