Her Worship: Hazel McCallion and the Development of Mississauga <i>By</i> TOM URBANIAK

Toronto : University of Toronto Press , 2009 . Pp. 336 , bibliographical references, index. Tom Urbaniak tackles a difficult and complex subject, the relationship between development in Mississauga and Hazel McCallion, together with the resulting effect on Mississauga's growth. His challenge is difficult because the McCallion era in Mississauga politics is in fact the period of massive pressure for development of the city, and complex because of the relationship that existed between developers and the community. I accepted my invitation to review this book with some degree of trepidation, given the fact that I was Mayor McCallion's city manager for almost ten years. My conscience is at ease, provided I make it clearly understood that I am favourably prejudiced. In my decade of service, development was still at its peak, and developers were still of the opinion that only they seemed to know what was best for Mississauga. I had the opportunity to see this great politician up close and watch her management style with fascination and delight. A day never passed when I did not learn something from Hazel. The author of this volume is a political scientist at Cape Breton University who does not come to his subject as a stranger. His previous published book was Farewell, Town of Streetsville: The Year before Amalgamation (Belleville, Ont.: Epic Press, 2002), and he launched his research on Hazel McCallion while a doctoral student at the University of Western Ontario. Urbaniak gives his readers a rare glimpse of the young Hazel as she grew up in the Gaspé. Her brother Lockhart was the mayor of their hometown, Port-Daniel, for a number of years. To some extent, this helped define Hazel's political future. To quote her sister Linda, “Hazel and Lockhart had the brains in the family. And so it didn't surprise me when Hazel went into politics” (p.17). Thus began the transformation of the young Hazel Journeaux as she began her business career in Montreal and eventually arrived in rural Streetsville in 1951 as Hazel McCallion. By choosing Streetsville, Hazel chose her milieu in politics. It was from here that she began her long successful climb to become the most influential and recognizable municipal politician in Canada while never losing the small town demeanor that she holds to this day. The book begins with a chapter entitled “The Road to 327 Queen St,” the address of city hall in Streetsville. Here Urbaniak skilfully dissects the politics of the day to reveal a politician who was developing a clear grasp of the relationship between elected officials and the public they represent. Urbaniak recognizes that the young Hazel was already as much a consummate politician as she is today. In November of 1969, Hazel McCallion became mayor of Streetsville. The subsequent creation of the City of Mississauga by Queen's Park overrode four years of intense lobbying by the residents of Streetsville, and its mayor, against the decision. On 1 January 1974, Mayor McCallion took office as Councillor McCallion on the new council of the City of Mississauga. This election placed McCallion squarely in the ranks of the “reformers”– a group of freshly elected politicians who did not support the freewheeling antics of developers. The newly elected mayor, Martin Dobkin, led the reformers. It was not long before Dobkin fell out of favour and was replaced by Ron Searle as mayor, in 1976. Hazel was acclaimed in what was her former Streetsville ward. It was about this time that she began to construct her relationship with the broader electorate of Mississauga. Although Urbaniak gives an insightful review of Searle's brief term as mayor, he does not seem to understand the fact that Hazel had already decided that now was the time for her to become the mayor by promoting an agenda that would appeal to the people of Mississauga. Having been in politics since 1967, her perspectives had been honed and her future was ready to be played out. Hazel McCallion defeated Searle to become the mayor of Mississauga in 1978. Some would say that the rest is history. Virtually all would say that she became unstoppable after her handling of the famous 1979 train derailment in Mississauga. This incident, which took its place in history by involving the largest peacetime evacuation of a Canadian community, simultaneously allowed McCallion to do what she does naturally – lead. It was the result of her lobbying after the derailment that the federal Parliament passed Bill C-25, An Act to Prevent the Transportation of Dangerous Goods, in November of 1979. Urbaniak stresses the symbolic importance of this act and states, “After several years of fractious councils and interminable squabbling, it seemed to many that Mississauga, finally, had a leader” (p. 106). From that time forward, Hazel McCallion would be Mississauga's unrivalled mayor. One of the interesting features of this book is the extensive series of notes, some fifty pages, that underpin the author's research. Many refer to the personal interviews he conducted. I was myself interviewed more than seven years ago as city manager of Mississauga and can testify to the pertinence of the questions he posed. In the result, he has sketched a portrait of Hazel McCallion's evolution as mayor that includes in some detail both her many battles with developers and those with senior levels of government. It clearly remains, however, that some perspectives have been ignored or distorted. For example, Chapter 7, which deals with the mayor as a tax fighter, overlooks her alleged aversion to tax increases as the basis for what she ultimately called “Mississauga's pay-as-you-go policy.” Urbaniak does not convey how this often frustrated various community groups. Hazel felt that if the community wanted something – for instance, a new sports centre – they should ask city council for funding only if they could demonstrate their “homework” by raising a substantial part of the cost themselves. This became her trademark and often led to a project becoming more of a community facility rather than something the city built. Although Urbaniak calls this tax fighting, I might venture to say there is a better case for saying it exemplifies good politics. The author seems to believe that McCallion was occasionally not focused on the right issues, and, in fact, he devotes an entire chapter, “Missed Opportunities” to this theme. I am inclined to leave much of this chapter to the judgment of Urbaniak's readers but feel compelled to challenge his assertion concerning “years of barely noticing that Mississauga had a university campus” (p. 199). Mayor McCallion's involvement with Erindale College and its development into the University of Toronto at Mississauga (UTM) was evidenced by her leadership in a fund-raising campaign that yielded over $8 million. Moreover, at the level of UTM's faculty, she actively sought out many of its members to assist with her work on the World Health Organization Committee on Healthy Cities. There are perhaps two things that have driven Hazel McCallion in the last fifteen years of her mandate. The first is her burning desire to continually re-create her community into a truly 21st-century city. To pursue this vision, she has engaged world-class city planners and transportation engineers to give Mississauga a city centre whose scale will make it the place where people can live, work and enjoy their community. The second is her still ongoing desire to separate Mississauga from the Region of Peel. Urbaniak's involvement as part of her Citizens Task Force on the Future of Mississauga, set up to review the issue of separation, gives him a unique perspective on how Hazel approached her dispute over the role of the Region of Peel in Mississauga's governance. She has never really accepted the Region of Peel as a level of government. In fact, she believes to this day that it is unnecessary. She did convince the current provincial government to give Mississauga the same number of votes on the regional council as those held by Brampton and Caledon (Mississauga had been in a minority, despite having the largest assessment and tax base supporting regional government). As these and other issues continue to play out in Mississauga, Tom Urbaniak is to be commended for his very good overview of Hazel McCallion as the mayor of all the people. His subject is one of the greatest politicians in Canada, and, despite the fact that she could have aspired to any provincial or federal office she wanted, she stayed true to her one love – the City of Mississauga. Overall, this book offers a well-written case study on leadership that will appeal to politicians, academics and public servants, as well as to those who simply admire Her Worship for all she has done for her city.

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