Kitchener

Kitchener a city in the Canadian province of Ontario, about 100 km (62 mi) west of Toronto. It is one of three cities that make up the Regional Municipality of Waterloo and is the regional seat. Kitchener was known as Berlin until a 1916 referendum changed its name. The city covers an area of 136.86 km2, and had a population of 256,885 at the time of the 2021 Canadian census.

The Regional Municipality of Waterloo has 575,847 people, making it the 10th-largest census metropolitan area (CMA) in Canada and the fourth-largest CMA in Ontario. Kitchener and Waterloo are considered "twin cities", which are often referred to jointly as "Kitchener–Waterloo" (K–W), although they have separate municipal governments.

Economy

Kitchener's economic heritage is rooted in manufacturing. Industrial artifacts are in public places throughout the city as a celebration of its manufacturing history. While the local economy's reliance on manufacturing has decreased, in 2012, 20.36% of the labour force was employed in the manufacturing sector.

The city is home to four municipal business parks: the Bridgeport Business Park, Grand River West Business Park, Huron Business Park and Lancaster Corporate Centre. The largest, the Huron Business Park, is home to a number of industries, from seat manufacturers to furniture components. Some of the notable companies headquartered in Kitchener include: Waterloo Brewing Company, D2L, Vidyard, and ApplyBoard.

Kitchener's economy has diversified to include new high-value economic clusters. In addition to Kitchener's internationally recognized finance and insurance and manufacturing clusters, digital media and health science clusters are emerging within the city.

Beginning in 2004, the City of Kitchener launched several initiatives to re-energize the downtown core. These initiatives included heavy investment, on behalf of the city and its partners, and the creation of a Downtown Kitchener Action Plan.

The modern incarnation of its historic farmers’ market, opened in 2004. The Kitchener Market is one of the oldest consistently operating markets in Canada. The Kitchener Market features local producers, international cuisine, artisans, and craftspeople.

In 2009, the City of Kitchener began a project to reconstruct and revitalize the main street in Kitchener's downtown core, King Street. In the reconstruction of King Street, several features were added to make the street more friendly to pedestrians. New lighting was added to the street, sidewalks were widened, and curbs were lowered. Movable bollards were installed to add flexibility to the streetscape, accommodating main street events and festivals. In 2010, the redesigned King Street was awarded the International Community Places Award for its flexible design intended to draw people into the downtown core. In 2009, Tree Canada recognized King Street as a green street. The redesigned King Street features several environmentally sustainable elements such as new street trees, bike racks, planter beds that collect and filter storm water, street furnishing made primarily from recycled materials, and an improved waste management system. The street was reconstructed using recycled roadway and paving stones. In September 2012, the City of Toronto government used Kitchener's King Street as a model for Celebrate Yonge – a month-long event which reduced Yonge Street to two lanes, widening sidewalks to improve the commercial street for businesses and pedestrians.

The groundbreaking ceremony for the University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy and downtown health sciences campus took place on 15 March 2006, and the facility opened in spring 2009. The building is on King Street near Victoria Street, on the site of the old Epton plant, across the street from the Kaufman Lofts (formerly the Kaufman shoe factory). McMaster University later opened a satellite campus for its Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine next to the University of Waterloo's School of Pharmacy. The Health Sciences Campus has been central to the emergence of Kitchener's health science cluster.

In 2007, Cadan Inc., a Toronto-based real estate development company, bought what had been the Lang Tannery for $10 million. Supported by the local government, Cadan repurposed the building for use by commercial firms. Since its refurbishment, the Tannery has become a hub for digital media companies, both large and small. Desire2Learn, an e-learning company, in the Tannery as the company expanded. In 2011, Communitech moved into the Tannery. Home to over 800 companies, Communitech is a hub for innovative high-tech companies in the fields of information technology, digital media, biomedical, aerospace, environmental technology and advanced manufacturing. Also in 2011, high-tech giant Google Inc. became a tenant of the Tannery, furthering its reputation as a home for leading high-tech companies. The Kitchener office is a large hub for the development for Google's Gmail application. In 2016, the University of Waterloo-sponsored startup hub Velocity Garage relocated to the building, bringing over 100 additional startup companies into the Tannery.

The Province of Ontario built a new provincial courthouse in downtown Kitchener, on the block bordered by Frederick, Duke, Scott and Weber streets. The new courthouse was expected to create new jobs, mainly for the courthouse, but also for other businesses, especially law offices. The new courthouse construction began in 2010.

Government

Kitchener is governed by a council of ten councillors, representing wards (or districts), and a mayor. Council is responsible for policy and decision making, monitoring the operation and performance of the city, analyzing and approving budgets and determining spending priorities. The residents of each ward vote for one person to be their city councillor; their voice and representative on city council. Municipal elections are held every four years in late October.

Kitchener was part of Waterloo County until 1973 when amalgamation created the Regional Municipality of Waterloo. The region handles many services, including fire, police, waste management, community health, transit, recreation, planning, roads and social services.

Kitchener residents elect four councillors at large to sit with the mayor on the Regional council.

The mayor of Kitchener is Berry Vrbanovic, who was elected to his first term in October 2014. See Kitchener City Council for a complete list of councillors.

Education

Kitchener has several public high schools, with Kitchener–Waterloo Collegiate and Vocational School, founded in 1855, being the oldest. It is located on King Street in the northern area of the city, not far from the boundary of Waterloo. In the 1950s and 1960s several new high schools were constructed, including Eastwood Collegiate Institute in what was then the southeastern part of the city in 1956, Forest Heights Collegiate Institute in the western Forest Heights part of the city in 1964, Grand River Collegiate Institute in the northeastern Heritage Park/Grand River Village area in 1967, and Cameron Heights Collegiate Institute in the southern area of the Downtown core in 1967. In 2006, Huron Heights Secondary School opened in southwestern Kitchener. It opened with a limited enrollment of only 9th and 10th grade students, and has since expanded to full capacity in the 2008–2009 school year.

The oldest Catholic high school in the city is St. Mary's High School, which opened in 1907 as a girls-only Catholic school. It was transformed into a co-ed institution in 1990 after the closure of the neighbouring St. Jerome's High School, which had been a boys-only Catholic school. The same year, a second Catholic high school, Resurrection Catholic Secondary School, opened in the west of the city, replacing St. Jerome’s High School, which operated from 1864 to 1990. In 2002, St. Mary's moved from its downtown location in favour of a new one in the city's southwest. The former St. Jerome's High School houses the Lyle S. Hallman Faculty of Social Work from Wilfrid Laurier University. It opened at this location in 2006, bringing 300 faculty, staff and students to downtown Kitchener. The former St. Mary's High School building, meanwhile, has been transformed into both the head office of the Waterloo Catholic District School Board and the Kitchener Downtown Community Centre.

The Doon neighbourhood, once a separate village, is now part of Kitchener. It is home to the primary campus of Conestoga College, one of the foremost non-university educational institutions in the province. For nine consecutive years, Conestoga has earned top overall ranking among Ontario colleges on the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) surveys, which measure graduate employment rates and satisfaction levels, and employer and student satisfaction. It is one of only seven polytechnical institutes in Canada.

The University of Waterloo opened a School of Pharmacy in the downtown area. The City of Kitchener has contributed $30 million from its $110 million Economic Development Investment Fund, established in 2004, to the establishment of the UW Downtown Kitchener School of Pharmacy. Construction began in 2006, and the pharmacy program was launched in January 2008 with 92 students.

The school is expected to graduate about 120 pharmacists annually and will become the home of the Centre for Family Medicine, where new family physicians will be trained, as well as an optometry clinic and the International Pharmacy Graduate Program. Construction on the $147 million facility was largely finished in spring 2009.

The University of Waterloo's (UW) Downtown Kitchener Health Sciences Campus is also the site of a satellite campus for McMaster University's School of Medicine. The Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine admits 28 students per year to the MD program at the Waterloo Regional Campus. Students complete their clinical placements at hospitals and medical centres in the Waterloo-Wellington Region. McMaster's satellite campus also features the Centre for Family Medicine, a family health team, and the University of Waterloo's School of Optometry clinic.

Emmanuel Bible College is also in Kitchener, at 100 Fergus Avenue.

Health care

Hospital services are provided by Grand River Hospital which includes a Freeport Campus and St. Mary's General Hospital, both located in Kitchener, as well as Cambridge Memorial Hospital. All three were highly ranked for safety in a national comparison study in 2017–2018, particularly the two located in Kitchener, but all would benefit from reduced wait times. Long-term care beds are provided at numerous facilities.

Grand River Hospital has a capacity of 574-beds; Freeport Health Centre was merged into GRH in April 1995. That secondary campus provides complex continuing care, rehabilitation, longer-term specialized mental health and other services. Built originally as a tuberculosis sanatorium and home for the terminally ill, Freeport also housesthe palliative care unit. The King St. location is also the home of the Grand River Regional Cancer Centre which opened in 2003. St. Mary's General Hospital is a 150-bed adult acute-care facility and includes the Regional Cardiac Care Centre with two cardiovascular operating rooms, an eight-bed cardiovascular intensive care unit and 45 inpatient beds. As of late 2018, Cambridge Memorial had 143 beds but was in the midst of a major expansion expected to be completed in 2021; that will add 54 new beds and double the size of the Emergency department.

Family doctors are often in short supply in K-W, and a source of great concern among residents. Recruiting efforts over the previous 15 years certainly achieved some success as of September 2018, but needed to be continued.

Announced January 2006, as a new School of Medicine, the Waterloo Regional Campus of McMaster University was completed in 2009. In 2018, the campus included "a complete on-site clinical skills laboratory with 4 skills rooms and 2 observation rooms, classrooms with video-conferencing capabilities and a state-of-the-art anatomy lab that was built in 2013 with a high definition video system", according to the university. Its Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine building includes the Centre for Family Medicine and the University of Waterloo School of Optometry and Vision Science.