Hazel turns 100
A birthday toast to Hazel McCallion, trailblazer and Canadian icon,
Even on the cusp of her 100th birthday, Hazel McCallion doesn’t feel old. The beloved former mayor of Mississauga is about as busy as your typical, hard-pressed millennial. Every day, she’s up by 5:30 a.m. and tends to a full schedule that she carefully maps out the night before: exercising in her spacious backyard; feeding the squirrels and birds so they’re “well taken care of”; sorting through the countless boxes of records and business cards that she accumulated over her 36-year run in office. “Those business cards are of no use now, but the other day I just went through them to remember the different names,” she tells me over Zoom from her home office, where she is dressed in a tomato-red blazer adorned with a bejewelled brooch.
McCallion officially stepped away from public life in 2014 at the age of 93, but calling her current career status a retirement is a bit of a misnomer. Her aforementioned itinerary is also dotted with virtual meetings for the various roles she still shoulders (like chancellor of Sheridan College and Chief Elder Officer at Revera, a company providing long-term care homes for seniors) and the handful of local boards she sits on. Mostly, McCallion says, she makes herself available for the community members who count on her sage advice. “Even though I’m retired as mayor, if people phone me, I try to help steer them in the right direction.”
McCallion’s career as a politician has been distinguished by many firsts: first woman to serve as mayor of Streetsville, in 1970, then the city of Mississauga, in 1978, which led to the title of longest tenured female mayor in Canadian history. And while she’s reluctant to dive deep into the systemic barriers that women face in the business and political spheres, McCallion does attribute her achievements to being brash and bold in spaces that were never meant for someone like her. She names her outspoken, plucky predecessors — former U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Charlotte Whitton, who served two terms as the first female mayor of Ottawa in the ’50s, among them — as early inspirations for getting ahead despite the odds.
“You have to feel like you can do anything a man can do,” she says. “You have to have confidence in yourself. If you’re confident, it permeates throughout the group of whoever you’re with.”
Come February 14th, the matriarch of Mississauga will carve out some time to celebrate her centennial birthday. Stay-athome orders will temper the expected revelry on the big day — last year’s 99th festivities included a parade of merrymakers who came through the local arena to see her, plus a standing ovation at a packedhouse Toronto Maple Leafs game — but she has been told to expect a bevy of culinary deliveries to her doorstep, including dinner prepared by the chef at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre. “I’m going to have more food than I’ll know what to do with,” she says with a laugh.
While McCallion is not known for being the warm and fuzzy type (they don’t call her “Hurricane Hazel” for nothing), all the reflection on her bountiful, accomplished life, one that she has “thoroughly enjoyed,” is not lost on her. But remaining as civically engaged as she has, she says, isn’t just a foil for idle hands; McCallion sees it as her duty — her purpose, really. “You gotta have a vision that you contribute in some way or another to your community while you’re on earth, even to your last day.”
Ultimately, it’s the community members — the students who frequent the local libraries she helped erect, the seniors she has tirelessly advocated for, the arts patrons who’ve benefited from her decades-long fundraising — who have made it all worth it for McCallion. Ask her what the solution to the obstacles that hinder our progress is, and she’ll unequivocally tell you that it’s us, the people. “You don’t go anywhere alone,” she says. “It’s others that help you along the way.”
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You gotta have a vision that you contribute in some way or another to your community while you’re on earth, even to your last day.