Bonnie Crombie ushers in post-McCallion era in Mississauga
The newly-elected council met for the first time Tuesday night, led by the first new mayor since Hazel McCallion was elected in 1978

TheStar.ca
Dec. 2. 2014
Alex Ballingall

Just before a new dawn broke in Mississauga politics, the first new mayor since Annie Hall won best picture at the Oscars offered a token of camaraderie to potential rivals on council.

She brought them cookies.

“She came around to my office yesterday with cookies,” said Carolyn Parrish on Tuesday, a few hours before the first council meeting since Bonnie Crombie replaced Hazel McCallion, a towering figure in the city’s public life for a generation, as mayor of Mississauga.

“I think they were biscotti,” said Matt Mahoney, a new face on the 12-member council, whose father Steven lost the mayoral race to Crombie on Oct. 27.

“She’s trying to reach out,” he said. “It’s going to be a big task for her to take on, as the first new mayor in 36 years.”

The city’s post-McCallion era officially began Tuesday, with the 54-year-old Crombie in the mayor’s chair for the first time at a council meeting beneath a newly-minted city logo to help usher in a new beginning.

The Star was unable to reach Crombie on Tuesday.

Over her 12 terms as chief magistrate, the 93-year-old McCallion oversaw huge changes to the city, which grew rapidly from a field-bound community west of Toronto to a sprawling suburban flatland.

Crombie, a McCallion loyalist who received a crucial, perhaps election-winning endorsement from the long-time mayor in the final weeks of the campaign, has pledged to continue her predecessor’s late-career drive to increase density in the city’s centre and improve transit.

But challenges abound as she takes the helm. Crombie faces a steep, $1.5 billion infrastructure deficit, with a population weary of hefty tax hikes of recent years that followed a decade of negligible increases. At the same time, the city’s roads are choked with traffic, and some on council hope the province will pull through with the $1.7 billion needed to build a light rail line up Hurontario St., one of Mississauga’s main thoroughfares.

“There is really a sense that this is a new era, but it’s also a very uncertain era,” said Tom Urbaniak, a political scientist who has closely followed Mississauga for years.

Ron Starr, who is returning as councillor in the city’s Ward 6, said Mississauga has been consumed by fiscal woes that didn’t exist in decades past, when development fees were filling the city’s coffers.

“There are no more Brinks trucks backing up to the back door,” he said Tuesday. “It’s going to be a real challenge. We are short no matter which way you put it.”

Making the task more difficult still, Starr acknowledged, is Crombie’s campaign pledge to keep property taxes at or below the rate of inflation. That means one of council’s first tasks will be to find “creative” ways to bring in fresh revenue, he said.

Parrish, a former Liberal MP who was also on Mississauga council from 2006 to 2010, echoed Starr in suggesting the city should consider borrowing money to keep the books balanced.

“It may be possible (to keep taxes low) if we can get over the idea of not borrowing,” said Parrish, who lost a bid for a council seat to Crombie when she entered municipal politics in 2011.

“We’ve got to come up with a plan that’s not going to kill the taxpayers.”

Picked out by Urbaniak as an early contender for “de facto opposition leader” on council, Parrish said one of her first priorities will be challenging the city’s transit plans. She calls the Hurontario LRT a train that “goes nowhere and does nothing,” and wants city staff to resurrect a plan from the 1980s to build a Mississauga subway that connects with the TTC at Kipling Station.

Mahoney, meanwhile, expects Crombie to go to bat for the city, ensuring Mississauga gets its “fair share” of provincial transit funding allocated for the GTA. He’s prepared to work with the mayor to make that, and other priorities, happen.

“I’m looking forward to being part of the positive change here in Mississauga,” he said.

Starr points to what he called Crombie’s relative inexperience in municipal government, with only three years on council after she was a local Liberal MP from 2008 to 2011.

“The mayor is going to be in the shadow of Hazel,” he said. “With leadership comes vision and that’s a factor that’s going to have to be proven to council and to the public.”

Urbaniak said the next few months will be telling in how the government moves on without McCallion’s presence.

“McCallion herself once predicted to me that her successor would be a one-term mayor,” Urbaniak said. “Because she had established such a presence in Mississauga politics, it would take the city a while to find it’s footing after her retirement. And she might have been right about that.

“We’ll know in the next couple months.”