While Mississauga turned into a massive city of immigrants, Hazel McCallion remained the same stubborn, penny-pinching mayor. Now, in her final term, her legacy is threatened by allegations of misconduct and a gang of critics determined to take her down By Katrina Onstad / Photographs by Naomi Harris
Sweet 90th: In January, a furor erupted over a leaked memo indicating that city hall would pay for councillors to go to McCallion’s birthday gala. The mayor dismissed the controversy as overblown
On a mid-January morning, Hazel McCallion looks out her backyard window and sees blood in the snow. Missy, her long-haired German shepherd, has killed a rabbit. The dog has never done this before, and it strikes McCallion as strange. She furrows her furrowed brow.
This is also the first day the mayor has agreed to let me watch her at work. A dead rabbit in the morning is an ominous sign, but those are everywhere these days. McCallion, who has built a successful career and a city without changing her approach in over 30 years, is now under siege. She’ll be 90 years old in a few weeks—a curiosity in itself—and her peculiar morning is just the start of another day in a year of scandal and recriminations.
I arrived at her 1980s two-storey brick house in Streetsville at 7:30, but she was awake long before—she starts every day at 5:30. She lives alone. (Sam, her husband of nearly 46 years, had Alzheimer’s, and died of pneumonia in 1997.) Her property is surrounded by similar houses. Much of the residential development in Mississauga happened in clusters, repetitive blocks of townhouses and condos, and almost everywhere you go you have the feeling you’ve been there before. McCallion says seven years ago her street ended in a farm. She would walk over to buy eggs.
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