McCallion fights hard for 12th term as Mississauga mayor
Royson James: Mississauga needs watchdog ‘group of seven’
By Royson James, City Columnist
Hazel McCallion hasn’t campaigned this hard in decades, if ever. But the matriarch of Mississauga isn’t rustling up votes to deliver her 12th straight term as mayor; rather, she’s working to defeat the only shadow of opposition she’s had during a 32-year reign: a pesky group of seven led by Carolyn Parrish.
If McCallion succeeds, it will be a huge blow to democracy and a boon to the self-importance, greed and entitlement that has now come to roost in the mayor’s office.
Voters should reject this petulant, self-serving bid from their mayor. Residents don’t “put Mississauga first” by populating city council with a company of compliant yes-men and -women.
Just what are the sins of Nando Iaannica, George Carlson, Carmen Corbasson, Sue McFadden, Frank Dale, Eve Adams and Parrish? They dared to challenge McCallion’s right to ignore all conventions of conflict of interest and promote a lucrative development project fronted by her son on lands near city hall.
They dared to ask for an inquiry to probe how the pension fund giant OMERS managed to get a veto power over the city-owned hydro utility, even though OMERS was a minority shareholder; and how this veto clause was inserted without council approval; and how the mayor signed this clause, contrary to the document council approved.
To spend one day at the Mississauga Inquiry, listening to McCallion and her real estate broker son, Peter, testify and obfuscate and skate around clear answers to clear questions is to know the “group of seven” should be applauded.
It is they, not McCallion’s cowardly backers such as Katie Mahoney, Pat Saito and Patricia Mullen, who should be re-elected and given the keys to preserving the city’s good name.
It’s a waste of paper and ink to advocate that voters turf McCallion for one of her 10 challengers — though there are capable replacements among them, such as Dave Cook. What bears saying, though, is that McCallion is totally misguided in her attempts to neuter the very little opposition she has on council.
The last thing Mississauga needs is a compliant, boot-licking, submissive council of followers — not now, in the twilight of McCallion’s career; not at a time when new ideas and visions should begin to surface and define the next 30 years; not when there is mounting evidence that Hazel’s one-person regime had significant flaws.
McCallion’s rule has been good for Mississauga. But the judicial inquiry will probably conclude that it came at a price. Hazel refuses to see that public interest and private interest must be separate.
She fails to separate friends and social buddies and dinner partners and developers. She mixes business with pleasure. She runs interference for and negotiates business extensions for her son’s company — all in the name of what’s good for Mississauga. And the said company just happens to be the only one that has never had to pay up-front development fees ($440,000) for the massive project it once planned as it began making its way through city hall.
“I started opening lids on little cans and the councillors started looking inside,” is the way Parrish explains her leadership in search of transparency at city hall.
It’s not surprising that the old guard wants to hold on to the ways of the past. They benefitted greatly by hanging on to Hazel’s skirt. She’s taken good care of her friends. An example:
The city’s utility, Enersource, had two city councillors and a number of citizens on the board. Unlike Toronto Hydro, where city councillors don’t get extra pay to serve as board members, Mississauga’s two politicians drew in an average $47,500 in compensation. That is above what was already among the highest compensation for city councillors in the country.
There’s more. The city manager also pocketed $38,000 — on top of the six-figure city salary — to sit on Enersource one Tuesday afternoon a month.
The problems started when Parrish tried to end this practice, only to have OMERS inform the elected officials that the company, not the elected officials, controlled the salaries.
How OMERS got that power, via David O’Brien, then city manager and friend and confidant of the mayor — who signed it but doesn’t know what she signed and claims not to know the veto existed — is one subject of the inquiry. And rightly so.
Embarrassed, McCallion tried to short-circuit plans to call the inquiry and failed. She has testified, but almost as a hostile witness, in her disarming and charming way of a powerful octogenarian. And now she wants to punish the councillors for seeking the truth.
It’s an odious initiative. Mississaugans would be better off to quietly hold their nose, vote Hazel in one last time, and overwhelmingly return a strong cadre of councillors who pledge to keep a careful watch on the mayor’s sunset years.
Parrish is indispensable in that task.
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/879183–royson-james-mississauga-needs-watchdog-group-of-seven?bn=1
