Downtown Kitchener doesn’t quite look like the rest of the riding that carries its name. Old factory blocks have become condo towers, a light-rail line runs through its spine, and on a summer evening the streets fill with residents in their twenties and thirties.
Downtown Kitchener at dusk on King Street. Photo: K Danko, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped from the original.
This is a city of renters: nearly half of households don’t own the roof over them (48%, 50th of 343, against two-thirds ownership nationally). They can afford to be here because the rent, on average a little over $1,500 for a two bedroom (what residents are paying, not market price), still undercuts Toronto’s. A tech economy is growing up around the university campuses of Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier, and Conestoga College, and it shows in who lives here — more than one in nine workers here are in natural and applied science fields (12%, 47th). Kitchener has a booming software economy, which pulls in the young and the credentialed; two in five working-age adults hold a university degree here, well above the national average. What all of this adds up to is a downtown of degree-holding renters in their thirties, people who own little, move often, and treat housing as a monthly bill rather than a financial asset.
Put those together and you get one of the most reliably progressive-leaning mixes in Canadian politics: young, educated, renting, urban.
The population leans left, but is not loyal to any one political party. The same voter who rents downtown, codes for a living, and watches the price of a one-bedroom rise can be a Green, a New Democrat, or a Liberal who wants a climate plan and a competent manager of finances in the same box. In Kitchener Centre all three left-leaning parties are represented, which is why it became one of the most interesting three-way races in the country.
On April 28, 2025, the Conservative, Kelly DeRidder, won the riding with 34.2% of the vote. Just behind her (by only 375 votes) was Mike Morrice, one of two sitting Green MPs. The Liberal, Brian Adeba, ran third at 29.3%. Three parties inside five points resulting in one of the ten closest races in the country.
It was not a city changing its mind as much as it was a city splitting into factions. In 2021 Morrice carried a large, already-divided progressive vote, which by 2025 had scattered. The Liberals nearly doubled their vote count under Mark Carney while the New Democrats fell from 9,000 votes to barely 1,200. Morrice’s own vote actually rose compared to his winning total four years earlier. However, the Conservative vote grew faster, from a quarter of the riding to a third, consolidating the right into one segment while the left spread itself across three.
The winner fits the place better than the banner suggests. DeRidder is a mechanical engineering technologist and former Conestoga College instructor who now sits on the House of Commons science and research committee. A tech-heavy riding sent a technologist to Ottawa, under the one party its demographics would not have predicted.
Seat projection by The Northern Vibe Project; base map ©Mapbox ©OpenStreetMap.
Based on the model numbers Kitchener Centre is a TOSSUP, the most competitive tier, effectively a coin-flip between the Liberals (32 % projected vote share), Greens (31%), and Conservatives (29%). A young, mobile, degree-heavy electorate with no settled partisan home means opportunity for all parties. While the towers keep changing the city skyline and the renters keep arriving, the three-way race won’t be settled just by the city aging into a single party. It turns instead on which of the three more left-leaning parties the majority decides to trust next, and whether the New Democrats under Avi Lewis, near zero here now, come back to crowd the lane again.
A city that leans one way, a system that rewards whoever splits least, and a seat 375 votes wide. Until it stops splitting and begins consolidating, this riding is going to stay a tossup.
Stay curious,
Matt, from the Northern Vibe Project
Edited by Caitlin
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