A city on the brink of real change
Having outgrown suburb role, Mississauga mayoral race is wide open for first time in decades
You may not be surprised to learn that Mississauga has a mayoral election underway. After all, Bonnie Crombie, the well-known leader of that city, left the job recently to take over as leader of the Liberal Party of Ontario.
But here’s the thing that might be a surprise: with less than three months to go until election day, we don’t know who is going to win yet. In most cities, an uncertain outcome at the beginning of an election may be the norm, but in the great beyond west of Toronto this is the first time since Jimmy Carter was in office that the outcome isn’t a foregone conclusion.
In its 50-year history, Mississauga has only had four mayors. The first two of them served one term each, for five years combined. Then for the longest time, there was the reign of Queen Hazel.
Hazel McCallion served 36 years in the job, for a total of 12 consecutive terms. For better and for worse, those elections weren’t even really competitions: twice she was acclaimed, and she made a point of not campaigning for re-election. In Mississauga, the certainties in life were death, taxes and Hurricane Hazel.
When McCallion retired ahead of the 2014 election, it seemed that for once there would be some actual drama — and maybe a choice for voters — ahead. But Hazel publicly gave the nod to Crombie as her chosen successor, and that was good enough for Mississaugans. She won handily, with almost two thirds of the vote, and then was re-elected in 2018 and 2022 by even larger margins.
So, this may really be the first truly competitive election in a long, long time. At least, it looks competitive at this point: 12 candidates have registered so far, with nominations still open until the end of April. A poll conducted by Liaison Strategies released Monday shows that at the moment, 37 per cent of voters say they are undecided. Beyond that, it shows longtime councillor and former MP Carolyn Parrish with 18 per cent support, longer-time councillor and former MPP Dipika Damerla with 15 per cent support, and upstart councillor Alvin Tedjo with 13 per cent support. Four other candidates whose names were polled also garnered between two and six per cent.
In other words, it looks like a race. (The Liaison Interactive Voice Recording poll of 902 registered voters claims a margin of error of plus or minus 3.26 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.)
For voters accustomed to not really having much of a realistic choice presented to them in elections, that may be unfamiliar. But it’s probably good news.
As my colleague Noor Javed recently wrote — and as she discussed with me this week for a This Matters podcast — at its 50th anniversary, the prototypical suburb is experiencing big-city growing pains. In Liaison’s polls and in Javed’s reporting, housing and affordability, traffic, transit and crime show up as the biggest issues (as they do in Toronto).
Its days of easy dollars and low-friction growth are behind it, as there’s no more land left to build the single-family-home subdivisions that so long defined its development. Existing homes are so expensive that they are pricing out of the market people who grew up there and would like to stay. Mississauga has been trying to build up a more conventional urban downtown and is easing its way into the kind of transit that can serve it.
These are the kind of issues you confront when you become a real city, and Mississauga has. It is Canada’s seventh-largest municipality by population (larger than Vancouver, Hamilton, Windsor and Quebec City). It is no longer a bedroom community, but instead is a net importer of commuting workers. It is the second-largest municipal economy in Ontario.
Given that, you would think we would hear more about its politics. Certainly for those of us next door in Toronto, where so many of the issues we’re confronting (traffic, transit, housing) are not just similar but are tied into the same regional economy, it seems like many solutions would be easier if the two regional powerhouse cities were able to work together, or at least join the same conversation.
And yet for all that, Mississauga residents recently told Javed that their city, so long content to be the country’s largest suburb, lacks a lot of the things you expect a good city to have, things like arts, entertainment, walkable communities and reliable transit.
Brandon Wiedemann, a paramedic and lifelong resident, said, “We are now at this stage where we are trying to figure out who we are.”
That’s a stage where confronting a real choice, and different ideas, in an election can be very helpful. And now, finally, it looks like they may get them.