By Jeff Hicks
CAMBRIDGE — A city grasping for unity and common identity is being pulled apart again.
Just tear along the dotted asphalt line of the world’s busiest highway. Take Hespeler and attach it to the Robin Thicke hips of Kitchener like a twerking Miley Cyrus.
The blurred-lines-work of a federal riding boundary commission is complete.
Forty hard years in the desert of amalgamation — spent sewing Galt, Preston and Hespeler into the uneasy Cambridge quilt — seems in vain.
The new federal riding of Kitchener South-Hespeler, the fifth riding in Waterloo Region, is born. That stings in Cambridge’s North-of-the-401 village, where Donna Reid is a ward councillor. Identity and autonomy — and pride — are wounded.
“I live in Cambridge, not Kitchener,” Reid said in an email to The Record.
“I don’t want to be subsumed under their name.”
But now, with the final report filed and changes expected to become official this fall, she will vote as one of the 97,673 members of Kitchener South-Hespeler, which includes a sliver of the old Kitchener-Conestoga riding east of Fischer-Hallman Road plus a slab of the current Kitchener Centre running southeast of Fairway Road North and Woolner Drive to Zeller Drive.
Here’s irony. The Mayor of Cambridge, Doug Craig, lives in Hespeler. He’ll vote in the Kitchener South-Hespeler riding next federal election. Not in Cambridge-North Dumfries riding.
You can look on the positive. The Cambridge riding, which had grown to a fat 126,000, gets slimmed down to a more workable 112,000 by the work of the commission.
The Region gets a fifth riding, one of 15 new seats for Ontario in the House of Commons. Cambridge gets an extra half-riding at a price of common identity.
It turns out you can take Hespeler and its 26,000 people out of Cambridge, after all.
But tacking them onto Kitchener? That’s a fresh slap to the three-cheeks of a long-amalgamated city tired of taking perceived political backhands from all levels.
Still waiting for Go Train. Still waiting for hospital expansion. Expecting to wait forever for light rail transit while footing the bill upfront.
Now the ultimate insult, Hespeler is really part of Kitchener.
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