It has been a decade of lows, highs and unexpected challenges for Waterloo Mayor Dave Jaworsky.
In 2010, the Waterloo mayor did not even have an inkling he would be entering into municipal politics and with 2020 quickly approaching, he is in his second term in office.
After being laid off from Blackberry, he spent the next couple of years in charity before he was pushed into entering the political arena by friends in 2013.
Jaworsky says friends told him that with his background at BlackBerry — “my teams were community relations, government relations, university relations, philanthropy, you know, all those things lend itself to community,” he says — he needed to “do something more.”
“They convinced me that, yeah, I could. I could run for mayor.”
Jaworsky considers the layoffs at Blackberry to be one of the worst stories of the decade for both himself and the city.
“BlackBerry at one point employed 10,000 people locally and in a period of a handful of years, it shed 9,000 jobs,” he lamented. “And to put that in perspective, that is as many jobs as our next two biggest employers have.”
He says it could have devastated the region’s economy but proved to be the opposite.
“Those people who were displaced stayed here, became entrepreneurs, helped other companies grow internationally,” he said.
He includes the thriving entrepreneurs among a group of positive stories that run hand in hand with the completion of the ION LRT through downtown Waterloo.
“OK, so 2010 to 2019 as I reflect on what has happened in this community since then, obviously the one that leaps out is light rail transit and the construction period and the effort that went through that and the transformative nature of light rail transit and what that will mean into the future,” the Waterloo mayor said.
As the LRT was constructed, the city also refurbished its downtown core.
“At the same time, we did a brand new streetscape, which continues to be constructed from William (Street) all the way up to University (Avenue),” Jaworsky said.
He noted that the highlight of downtown during the previous decade was Kmart and things went downhill after its demise.
”The anchor tenant, the excitement of Uptown, was Kmart,” Jaworsky noted. “It got worse after Kmart went out of business. Then it became a Liquidation World.”
But times have changed, Jaworsky proudly states.
“And so you look at where we’ve come in this decade — it’s a shock. It’s one of the best uptowns in all of Ontario.”
Along with the redevelopment of the LRT, and Uptown, the Waterloo mayor says the decade saw his city start to go vertical rather than horizontal as a decision was made to prevent urban sprawl from swallowing up more farmland.
“That was a story for the decade of the planning of the City of Waterloo intensification and making better use of the resources that we have in terms of infrastructure.”
Another major change for the city was the rapid growth of post-secondary institutions.
“Our schools on University (Avenue) have skyrocketed,” he said.
“The University of Waterloo is definitively on the world stage. Laurier continues to grow like gangbusters with the brand new business school,” Jaworsky said. “And then finally, Conestoga College growing from — God, it could be no people. I’m not sure when they started on University Avenue in Waterloo, to a thousand people a couple of years ago to 4,000 people by the end of next year.”
While he points to multiple success stories over the past 10 years in his city, he also laments other failures outside of Blackberry’s contraction.
Jaworsky mentioned a crisis that afflicted not just his city, but spread across Canada.
“The advent of the opioid crisis took Canada, North America by storm and that, you know, the issues that we have today,” he says. “It’s so addictive, so harmful. A killer drug.”
A more localized issue was the explosion in the number of people who were attending unsanctioned street parties on Ezra Avenue. A peak crowd of 33,000 people were on the street and others surrounding it for St. Patrick’s Day.
This is an issue the mayor hopes to clean up over the next few years.
The street parties are connected with the city’s universities, which Jaworsky also credits for helping to make the city more multicultural.
“They’re attracting international talent from professors to students, and that’s making our community much more international in flavour.”
He says that has helped guide his current council’s plans going forward as it made it part of the agenda going forward.
Council is looking “to create a place that’s welcoming to all, welcoming to all the international students, to the international people, to refugees. We’re focusing on neighbourhoods and getting to know your neighbour.”