When the decade got underway, Karen Redman was taking a well-deserved rest from politics.
The longtime Liberal MP had been defeated after 20 years in office and was keeping busy by finishing up a master’s degree in political science while also working for Habitat for Humanity.
Her work with the latter was helping her prepare for her next stop.
“What I was doing 10 years ago was really experiencing municipal politics from the other side of the desk because I was working through getting development and planning approvals through in the City of Kitchener because that happened to be where we were building for Habitat for Humanity,” Redman explained.
Four years later she would be elected to the regional council and after another four years, Redman would replace longtime regional chair Ken Seiling.
Over the past decade, Redman said the way police have been forced to operate locally has shifted dramatically.
“I think policing has taken on a much more complicated role,” Redman said.
She explained that police are working to deal with the growth of cybercrime as well as the task of dealing with a growing metropolis.
“I think it’s a bit shocking to think that we have some of these big-city problems, such as drug addiction, such as organized crime, such as gangs,” Redman said.
“We’re not a sleepy little community anymore. We’re a big city. We’re over 600,000 people.”
She says she has seen tremendous transformation in the region over the past decade. Some of it was through willingness, while other changes were born of necessity.
“The last decade, I think, was a new outward-facing economic landscape for Waterloo region and very much based on an internal sense of values and entrepreneurship and innovation,” the regional chair explained.
With Blackberry shrinking and other companies such as Schneiders leaving the area, the economic landscape has seen a drastic shift.
“There was an explosion (of high-tech startups) after the demise of BlackBerry,” she said.
The company went from having 10,000 employees to 1,000 at the start of the decade.
“A lot of people reinvented themselves and started businesses that brought other people along and attracted a lot of new people to come to the region,” Redman said.
“I think the explosion that seemed to occur after BlackBerry had to let all of its staff go was based on a sense that this community always embraces the possible.”
While the economic change was a major story of the decade in Waterloo region, she noted that it was probably not the largest.
In June, the region launched the ION LRT. A project that first began a couple of decades ago finally bore fruit.
“It isn’t just about getting it done,” Redman said. “It’s how we got it done.”
She noted all of the time and thoughtful effort it took to plan and build the operate the transit system before it launched.
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“It took 20 years to build (the ION LRT) that has run efficiently,” Redman stated. “We reorganized our entire Grand River Transit system.
“So we’re now on a grid system as opposed to a hub and spoke.”
She also credited the patient planning the region undertook to get the consumption and treatment services site launched in downtown Kitchener this fall.
“It has run very, very well, smoothly, because we took the time to get the process right,” Redman explained.
While the regional chair says the site’s opening has gone well, she laments the fact that more had not been done already as Waterloo’s biggest missed opportunity.
“Crime Prevention Council was talking about drug addiction,” she said. “We could see it coming from the west to the east. It kind of skipped over us the first time, too, but hit us hard on the way back.
“The extent of the personal devastation and how ubiquitous drug abuse is — I wish we could’ve and probably should’ve seen that coming and reacted more quickly to it.”
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