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Waterloo is a sleepy, postindustrial city of 100,000, a little less than 200 miles northeast of Detroit. Ummm ... Waterloo-Kitchener-Cambridge form the K-W region (these 3 blend together with indistinguishable border) of ~ 1/2 Million peoople. Hardly "sleepy" the region is know as Canada's Tech Triangle and has a vibrant corporate and startup economy. While it is 200 miles northeast of Detroit, it may as well be 2000 ... Detroit has no influence whatsoever. More accurate would be to say it is ~50 miles from Toronto.

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Common, anyone who has even driven through Waterloo knows it's sleepy... No one says "shit, I really want to go to Waterloo". That's like saying people want to go to London (Ontario)... That's just not a thing

Yes, this is like calling Sunnyvale a sleepy, post-agricultural city of 100,000. It's somewhere between inaccurate and disingenuous.

To be fair, all of the Silicon Valley cities, including San Jose itself, are sleepy and post-agricultural. Or at least sluggish and suburban.

KW, like the rest of the 401 corridor, still has a huge industrial base, much of which is deeply involved with Detroit and the rest of the US manufacturing base.

The postindustrial side of KW may be the what gets all the PR and kudos, but as a whole, in terms of pure economic output and employment, manufacturing is still a substantially greater influence in the region.

I did my 5 years at Waterloo (Systems Design Eng) and I wouldn't disagree with the description of Waterloo being sleepy. Especially these days with Blackberry turning many of the areas near the campus into ghost towns.

1/2 million? Waterloo has 100k residents, kitchener has 200k, Cambridge is too far from Waterloo to be counted in that group

"The [Waterloo] Region's population was 507,096 as of the 2011 census."

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_Region

It doesn't really matter what the numbers say. If you have spent any time at all in Waterloo I don't think you would argue that it wasn't a sleepy little Canadian town. And there is nothing wrong with being a sleepy little Canadian town, of course.

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