Moving Forward, Together

If you’re reading this piece, it means you care about this community and it means you care about where this community is headed. Just by choosing to run your business in Waterloo Region, you are playing a big part in continuing to grow the fabric of this place we call home.

Recently, I had opportunity for a conversation with the Greater Kitchener Waterloo Chamber of Commerce Board to discuss what lies ahead in the early post-COVID years and bring into view the Waterloo Region we are building.

Our conversation touched on many of the priorities relevant to you and to your businesses. We spoke about attainable housing and housing choice, about jobs now and jobs of the future, about immigration, talent attraction and economic recovery. We spoke about the need to create even stronger strategic local partnerships and combined advocacy to build for the future. What underpinned most of our conversation was the reality that we are moving through a time of incredible growth.

Afterwards, it struck me that in generations to come, we may well look back on this period as a defining era in the ongoing history of the region.

Let’s consider the current level of growth for a moment. Right now, our population sits at about 650,000 people, and we expect that this will increase to almost one million by 2051 – roughly the equivalent of adding a city the size of Vaughan to this community.

This is exciting. Growth opens doors and it creates possibilities. But it also places great pressure on services and poses challenging decisions when priorities are at odds with each other. How do we maintain (or improve!) service levels while balancing the realities of inflation, cost increases and resource shortages?

We feel this pressure in the municipal sector, in the education and health sectors, and while it is tough at times, it does serve to sharpen focus and it enables people to think deeply about the community we are building. This is a good thing.

Ultimately, we are working to build an inclusive, thriving and sustainable region with global reach, fostering opportunities for current and future generations. And the role businesses play and the types of businesses we have here are vital to this future.

At the Region, we just concluded our most challenging budget process to date, and as we continued to fund essential services like roads and transit, we prioritized investing in assets like the airport, investments that will pay dividends in the future – for residents and businesses alike.

In the same way that our population is expected to increase, so too will the number of jobs in this region – by approximately 50% over the next 30 years.

And the big question many are wrestling with now is what kind of jobs will this increase accommodate?

Waterloo Region is truly unique. Ours is a community rich with a variety of talent, where farmers and scientists are building the future side-by-side, so without a crystal ball on my desk, it’s tough to wager exactly what Waterloo Region’s workforce of the future might look like. But based on the breadth of who is investing here now – from aerospace to advanced manufacturing – it’s safe to say that it will be diverse and cutting-edge.

Organizations across the region are asking: how do we prepare for this growing and diverse workforce of the future? Housing is at the cornerstone of this approach and in the same way that we strive for a mix of jobs, we also need to plan for an array of housing options. To accommodate our projected growth trajectory, including the attraction of our future workforces, we have anchored our growth plan in housing by planning for the addition of over 100,000 new housing units here in Waterloo Region.

Importantly, the growth plan focuses on a mix of housing forms. This will help accommodate workforces with diverse needs, support climate action, and promote affordability. The strategic use of intensification also means optimizing existing infrastructure to limit costs.

I moved here in the mid-1990s (still feels like yesterday!) and at that time, about 10% of new builds were in the high-density bucket. Fast forward to today, and that number is stretching close to 60%.

So while we expect that in 2051 the majority of homes in the Region will still be lower-density forms (single and semidetached), it’s wonderful to see developers, municipalities and others partnering to determine how to best provide for a range of housing choices.

During that same conversation with the board at the Chamber, we talked about intentionally diversifying our business ecosystem. An example of that is the emerging aerospace industry and its links to the Region of Waterloo International Airport (YKF).

As Waterloo Region continues the journey to a world-class community, the airport plays a key role. It’s impossible to imagine a world-class community without a thriving airport, and at YKF we are going through transformative change with a $35 million expansion project that is creating more travel choices for businesses with connections to economic hubs across Canada and the US.

Often overlooked from an Ec. Dev. perspective is the fact that over 500 residents come to work at YKF each day. Think of your airport as a growing aviation and aerospace cluster on your doorstep that has helped attract 125 companies working in the sector, with more and more to come.

Coming back down to the ground from YKF, and further examining this period of incredible growth, there’s no doubt that we are all wrestling with similar questions. How do we balance growth with affordability? How do we attract talent and differentiate ourselves from our competition? How do we create an environment for attainable housing? And how do we expand all of the public services that go along with that?

We are faced with many of these big questions at the Region of Waterloo, but what helps me sleep at night is the comfort of knowing that as organizations and as friends, we have quality partnerships across this community that we all lean into. These are partnerships with long-laid foundations that were strengthened by our work together during the pandemic.

Reflecting again on that recent conversation with your Chamber’s board, what struck me was the opportunity that exists for businesses of all sizes as we face into this period of growth.

For the Region, growth means more infrastructure, more transit, more cultural supports. It also means more supports from a social and health perspective for the most vulnerable in our community.

And for the Region, the more we know about the needs of our businesses, the better equipped we will be to leverage this growth and plan for the Waterloo Region of the future.

Our touchpoints will be many over the coming months as the Region launches the Waterloo Region Economic Development Strategy and the Waterloo Region Talent Attraction, Reskilling and Retention Plan (more to come on both of those). These will be further opportunities to work collaboratively to help shape tomorrow’s Waterloo Region.

I’m personally excited to continue the conversation as we head into this historic period of growth together.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bruce Lauckner

Bruce Lauckner is the Chief Administrative Officer at the Region of Waterloo where, in collaboration with partners, he is helping ensure this community continues to thrive. At the Region, he guides an energetic, dedicated team that delivers critical services to residents on a daily basis.