“But at the centre of so many comparisons lie the differences between boldness and timidity, assertiveness and reservation, looking forward and looking backward, bold action and posturing, collaboration and self-absorption, and political leadership and the lack of it.”

--- --- ---

It’s more than just a story about a city that can’t get its trucks in a row.

It’s really a tale of two cities — London and Kitchener — and how the debate over food trucks downtown crystalizes the growing difference between the two regional hubs.

It begins with municipal DNA.

London’s past century has been built on the foundation of public ­institutions and the service sector: Western University, Fanshawe College, banks, insurance companies and the like. Manufacturing, innovation and ­entrepreneurship have always been present, but historically have thrived as adjuncts to those mainstay sectors. And as the London region’s economy has undergone a sea change over the past decade, the befuddlement about its future has grown, along with its ­unemployment rate, now at 8.2%.

Hardscrabble Kitchener, long ­perceived as the poor sister to white-collar, university-dominated Waterloo, has had to rely on manufacturing and industry as its lifeblood over the same historical era. That worked well for decades. But when the first signs of economic shift and disruption began in the 1980s, Kitchener was forced to adapt. It was ahead of similar-sized cities across Canada in seizing on the tech sector as its future, while also nurturing ingenuity and creativity in other economic precincts. Today, even in the face of the dramatic decline of Waterloo’s BlackBerry, the city sees entrepreneurship and innovation as the cornerstones, not just of its economy, but of its downtown.

Today, Kitchener’s official economic development strategy is built on ­nurturing start-ups, encouraging ­commercial clustering and collaboration, becoming a “talent magnet,” revitalizing its downtown, and ­accomplishing the latter, in part, by creating an “innovation district” smack-dab in the centre of the city. Expect to hear more about the latter as, in the coming years, both public and private dollars are poured, by the ­hundreds of millions, into that project. The city’s current unemployment rate: 6.6%.

Kitchener’s successes, however, are derived from more than DNA — It also took fortitude and guts. In contrast to London, where city councillors have for decades looked over their shoulders at developers and landowners, repeatedly blocking construction of a ring road, Kitchener recognized the importance of the Conestoga Expressway as early as the 1960s. Today, 45 years later, no one doubts it’s a key economic asset — perhaps the single most important piece of public infrastructure — in the region.

Here’s another comparison: Kitchener and London have both designated the Ontario Ombudsman’s office as their closed-meeting investigator. Over the last four years, London has racked up thousands of staff hours at the OO’s offices, generating four separate investigations and reports. The number of hours chalked up by Kitchener during the current council’s term? Zero. Kitchener’s councillors, led by retiring mayor Carl Zehr, tend to see themselves as directors of a corporation hired by citizens, obliged to work quietly and efficiently to achieve measurable results. Personality conflicts seldom crop up — or at least seldom make the news.

London’s council, by contrast, is too often characterized by posturing, self-interest, personality clashes, accusation and equivocation, under dubious leadership.

In Kitchener, entrepreneurship extends deep into the arts, too. The Centre in the Square, opened in 1980 for just more than $11 million, contains two performance halls and other multipurpose spaces. Its acoustics drew rave international reviews from the day it opened and the building continues to be home to the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, as well as the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery.

But its success hasn’t been free. Taxpayers subsidize the facility to the tune of about $1.4 million a year. Last month, the City of Kitchener hired a New York-based consultant, at a cost of $67,000, to see what could be done to make the centre more nimble and responsive to consumer tastes and one-off opportunities. One perceived problem: The symphony locks down so many dates so far in advance, programmers can’t take advantage of emerging concert options.

The list goes on. But at the centre of so many comparisons lie the differences between boldness and timidity, assertiveness and reservation, looking forward and looking backward, bold action and posturing, collaboration and self-absorption, and political leadership and the lack of it.

This week, both cities made a decision about food trucks. London’s city councillors looked backwards and worried about what would happen to existing restaurants if they permitted a little more competition downtown. Had council not nixed the idea entirely, the annual licence fee for food trucks would likely have been more than $2,600.

Kitchener councillors unanimously approved small changes to existing rules governing the operation of food trucks downtown, which are a proven success. Rather than being preoccupied with existing restaurants and eateries, the city is looking forward by welcoming the innovation and entrepreneurship that rolling restaurants, on a small-scale level, represent. And they’ve welcomed them. Kitchener’s annual licence fee for food truck operators: $350.

In the end, this yarn isn’t really about the food trucks — they won’t make or break a community. But the contrast between the two cities is the stuff of an instructive Aesop fable.

Larry Cornies lives in London and teaches journalism at Conestoga College in Kitchener and Western University in London.

cornies@gmail.com