Monday, September 24, 2012

We do a fantastic job of thinking about, talking about, and celebrating the future being planned and made here in Waterloo. And that has led us to often struggle in reflecting on and celebrating our past. Reconciling both is, in my view, critical to our future success as a strong and vibrant community. This is why I was so pleased with the events of the last few days.

Last Friday, I had the great pleasure of attending the official opening of the Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre at the University of Waterloo. Dr. George Dixon did a stunning job of connecting the future discovery that would happen in this 285,000 square foot space to discoveries past, including when Christopher Columbus set off to find Asia and stumbled unknowingly on the Americas. It took more than 100 years to really understand what was found and to write that story, which reminds us that the real story of the QNC will not be known until history has an opportunity to reflect on the discoveries of the quantum-nano revolutions that are launching from right here in Waterloo.

Mike Lazaridis picked up on this theme when he called the QNC the Bell Labs of the 21st century. Bell Labs was the site of advances as diverse as the LASER, microchips, cellular technology, fibre optics, and electron microscopes. Those advances, which led to Silicon Valley, were compared to those to come out of the QNC, which he said would produce a Quantum Valley right here in Waterloo.

Renowned physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking was also on hand, which brought hoards of our best and brightest students out to crowd around the entrance, and it has been his work that has revolutionized many of our views about what surrounds us, with the stories of how those thoughts affect our world still being written.

Over the weekend, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, in fêting Kitchener’s 100th birthday, brought one of the giant musical leaps forward to the stage. Beethoven’s Ninth symphony was an epic feat, combining musical styles of the time and making bold statements about the nature of our relationships to each other as part of a community. It reverberated throughout the remainder of the 19th century, was triumphantly played on the occasion of the liberation of Czechoslovakia, and still brings strong emotional reactions to audiences, as it did this past weekend. The past is what frames the stories we tell in the future, in ways that we cannot conceive at the time.

And that brings us to our own past and what it has to say about how we will write our future story.

The Waterloo Horticultural Society has been maintaining the garden space between Knox Presbyterian Church and the Marsland Centre on Erb Street West in Uptown Waterloo. But this space is more than just a garden.

In the First World War, the Town of Waterloo sent many of its sons, brothers, and fathers overseas to fight. Over those horrific years, we lost 16 of our neighbours to the war. In their memory, the Cenotaph now located on Regina Street, along with sixteen maple trees were placed and planted. Over the years, we lost touch with this story of bravery and this place of memory.

Thanks to Carol and Dave Marshall, this was rectified on Sunday.

In a touching and thoughtful ceremony in which I was pleased to participate, a new Arbour was dedicated to the memory of those sixteen fallen. The City supported this through our cash grants process as well as our inaugural neighbourhood matching grant program. Acclaimed Canadian actor, Paul Gross, was on hand to lend his grandfather’s story of WWI, which led him to create the film “Passchendaele”. It was a tale of lives forever changed, just as the landscape of Europe and our understanding of the horrors of war was forever changed.

Our story was that story, but over time it also became a story that was forgotten. There is something significant about a horticultural society reminding us of our story of war, and without them, Sunday could not have happened.

Waterloo has a noble past, marked by hard work and boldness in discovery, always looking to build a better future. The stories we will write 100 years from now about the discoveries we are able to make here will not just be written by technology gurus and scientists. They will be written as much by gardeners, by our neighbours, by our friends even more than by those making the discoveries and the products that come from those discoveries. Waterloo is a city that builds on its history, in superposition with our Quantum Valley future.