rfmcdonald | [BRIEF NOTE] On Mississauga (Reply)

Whenever I spent any time in Mississauga, Toronto's western neighbour and a city that, with a population of almost seven hundred thousand people, is Canada's sixth municipality by population, I felt like there was no there there. It's a collection of three or four relatively dense urban centres surrounded by vast tracts of suburbia, all developed in the age of the automobile without any serious investment in public infrastructure. Andrew Barton, for one, doesn't like this model.

Since 1978, Mississauga has been under the rule of "Hurricane" Hazel McCallion, who had better be some kind of robot or Highlander because if she ever dies, the city is going to spiral into chaos because no one will know what to do. Under her authority, Mississauga has remained free of debt, which is frequently bandied about in Mississauga vs. Toronto flame wars as evidence of Mississauga's superiority.

Personally, I ask, what use is it having no debt if this if you have to build a place like Mississauga in order to achieve it? The reason I ribbed my Mississaugan friend the way I did is because Mississauga does not feel like a city - it feels like Barrie, with five hundred thousand more people crammed in. It's a massive suburb that has sprawled and sprawled until it can sprawl no more.

Yilmaz Alimoglu, a Mississauga resident, wrote critically about this last year.

[I]t bothered me that Mississauga did not have a single downtown. It had several downtowns, each begun and not really finished – Streetsville, Port Credit and the junction of Eglinton and Hurontario.

What I realized was that Mississauga accidentally had become a city by massive and rapid population growth but it was conceived of as a suburb. So what does that make it now?

Officially, Mississauga is the sixth-largest city in Canada. But to people in Toronto, it is just a suburb.

Allow me to clarify: Mississauga is a city. Ask Hazel McCallion, the most loved and respected mayor in Canada. Why do we love her? Because of the financial books – we're a debt-free municipality.

But we don't live on paper. We live on streets and sidewalks and in coffee shops and malls. And Mississauga is not working right now. Rapid growth and non-stop development have overcome my ability to cope.

The nice things about Toronto were being able to go for walks in the evening, going for coffee and meeting lots of friends. But Mississauga feels very isolated – residents have little contact with each other. I am lucky that we have a coffee shop at the corner of Hurontario and Eglinton. It's where I have met most of my friends who've come to Mississauga from all corners of the globe.

In Toronto, there are many city-sponsored programs that any person can enjoy. But in Mississauga, we have to pay for everything. Is Mississauga only for the well-off?

I cannot find many books that I want to read at Mississauga's libraries and have to ask my wife to bring them from the Toronto library system.

We have to drive everywhere. If you're a resident of Mississauga and do not own a car, life is hard. The public transportation system is one of the least developed in North America.

Much of the blame for this has been placed Hazel McCallion, Mississauga's amazingly popular mayor who has reigned since 1978 on a platform of low taxes. This has spurred rapid growth, with many corporations choosing to place their headquarters in Mississauga instead of Toronto, but it has also led to sustained underinvestment in crucial elements of Mississauga's infrastructures like roads, say. (New tax levies, amazingly, are still quite unpopular among many Mississaugans.) Even with an ongoing conflict of interest investigation, McCallion's popularity ratings seem to be doing just fine.

I find it difficult to disagree with the Toronto Star's urban affairs columnist Christopher Hume when he wrote yesterday that Mississauga might need turnover but isn't likely to get it.

Of course, only a quarter of Mississaugans bothered to vote in the last civic elections, one of the lowest turnouts in any jurisdiction. Some might say that the reason for such a turnout is the excellence of McCallion's leadership. Others argue it is a result of a level of indifference so profound no one cares anymore.

And what exactly do Mississaugans have to show for her decades in power. Low taxes, supporters might say, and lower civic debt.

Let's hope that's enough, because beyond that they have little to feel good about. The fact is that they have bought into a city so unprepared and ill-equipped for the 21st century it could serve as a poster community of how not to build a city.

Indeed, by McCallion's own account, Mississauga planners and politicians have made every mistake in the book, allowing the construction of one car-dependent subdivision after another, each more isolated and wasteful than the next. Postwar planning, based as it was on cheap oil, single-use zoning and endless highways, is writ large here.

[. . .]

Mississaugans must have been thrilled when McCallion announced recently that she would seek yet another term in 2010. It will be her 12th run, and unless voters suddenly come to their senses – or bother to vote – she will prevail.

Generations of leadership have been bypassed; the fresh ideas and new approaches they would have brought will remain untried. Instead, the community will settle for the same old, same old.