Kate Bueckert
Kate Bueckert focuses on how politics, public safety and community life intersect in southern Ontario, often through stories that give people concrete details about what governments, councils and institutions are doing and how it affects them. She is a producer for CBC Kitchener-Waterloo and has been covering issues in southern Ontario for more than 20 years. Her recent work ranges from election logistics and municipal council fights to technology in care homes, major data breaches, sports governance and regular guides to what is happening around Waterloo region and nearby communities.
Municipal politics and elections
Bueckert’s political coverage centres on the mechanics and personalities of local and regional politics, with a strong emphasis on how and where people vote and what is at stake in their communities. She has written detailed explainers on advance polls for the Ontario election, spelling out dates, hours, and the specific advance polling locations in ridings across Waterloo region, Guelph and Wellington so that voters know exactly when and where they can cast a ballot. In her municipal election reporting, she has highlighted when Cambridge residents can be the first in the region to vote, again focusing on precise timing and process rather than abstract commentary.
Her work also covers the internal tensions of municipal politics, including a story where the Cambridge mayor publicly challenged a councillor over what she described as “false information” tied to a motion on encampments, documenting the conflict, the motion’s substance and its implications for local governance. At the federal level, she has followed party leadership dynamics, such as the Green Party of Canada leadership race where former MP Mike Morrice became the lone candidate after Nira Dookeran withdrew, framing the development in terms of its impact on local representation and national party direction. She has additionally reported on road safety as a pressing crisis in rural Ontario, covering a provincial group’s push for changes and connecting policy debates to everyday realities on rural roads.
Community events and local culture
A defining strand of Bueckert’s work is a long-running series of service pieces under the banner “Kate’s 5 fun things to do in and around Waterloo region,” which functions as a recurring guide to arts, festivals and community events. Week after week, she selects and packages a mix of events from Waterloo, Kitchener, Cambridge, Guelph and surrounding communities, giving readers short, practical descriptions along with key details like dates, venues and highlights.
Her lists have featured everything from busker festivals, ribfests and fall fairs to the Kitchener Blues Festival, Guelph Fringe Festival, Doors Open Waterloo Region, K-W Oktoberfest events, studio tours and multicultural celebrations, showing an emphasis on both marquee events and smaller local gatherings.
These guides consistently balance entertainment with a sense of place, surfacing local art walks, fibre arts days, ghost tours, Emancipation Day celebrations and community porch parties alongside hockey games and niche festivals.
The format is straightforward and repeatable, but the selections demonstrate breadth: she moves easily from music to food, heritage, sports and family activities, with the common thread being that each item is something a resident can do that weekend. In this work she functions as a curator of local life, giving tangible options rather than commentary and reinforcing a deep familiarity with the rhythms of the region’s cultural calendar.
Public safety, technology and the courts
Beyond politics and events, Bueckert covers stories at the intersection of public safety, law and technology, often grounding complex issues in specific cases and local impact.
She has reported on a major hacking case tied to the Snowflake data breach, detailing how a Canadian man from Kitchener pleaded guilty in U.S. court to computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and conspiracy after data was stolen from 165 organizations and victims were extorted for millions of dollars. In that story she connects global-scale cybercrime to a local figure and explains the charges, the method of accessing cloud storage and the companies affected, including telecommunications and ticketing firms.
Her technology reporting also includes coverage of an AI-driven safety system for long-term care homes, describing how researchers at the University of Waterloo use a wall-mounted radio and artificial intelligence to track residents’ routines without cameras or wearables and how a local company has begun piloting the system in a facility. On the everyday safety side, she has highlighted road and traffic risks, such as an article about a person riding an e-scooter at high speed alongside traffic on a Kitchener expressway, where she lays out what the law says, police warnings and why such behaviour is considered unsafe.
Together with her reporting on a provincial group’s call to address a pressing crisis of road safety in rural Ontario, these pieces show a consistent focus on concrete behaviours, enforcement and infrastructure rather than abstract debate.
Sports and civic institutions
Bueckert’s coverage also extends to the governance and business side of sports, particularly when local teams make strategic moves that affect fans and the regional sports landscape. She has written about the KW Titans basketball team’s bid to join the Canadian Elite Basketball League, explaining that the team’s owners are pausing plans to play in the Basketball Super League while they pursue a spot in the CEBL and outlining what that shift means for upcoming seasons. In that story she situates the Titans within broader league structures and uses the bid to show how local sports organizations navigate changing opportunities and competitive environments.
This strand fits with her wider pattern of focussing on institutions - political, technological or athletic - and showing, in specific terms, how their decisions reshape everyday life in and around Waterloo region.
4 more politics journalists.
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Abhishek De
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Adam MacVicar
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Aishwarya Dudha
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