Hazel McCallion, who because the longest-serving mayor in Canadian historical past reworked the sleepy Toronto suburb of Mississauga right into a multicultural dynamo and the nation’s sixth-largest metropolis, died at her dwelling there on Jan. 29, 9 years after she ended her 36-year run. She was 101.
Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario and an in depth good friend of Mrs. McCallion’s, mentioned she died from pancreatic most cancers.
When Mrs. McCallion first gained workplace, in 1978, Mississauga was a sprawling centerless group of about 250,000 individuals, little greater than an extension of Toronto, its a lot bigger neighbor to the east. At this time it has a dense downtown core of skyscrapers, sturdy arts establishments and 750,000 individuals.
And whereas Mississauga within the Seventies was overwhelmingly white, the town is now one in every of Canada’s most various, drawing immigrants from East and South Asia.
Mrs. McCallion didn’t simply survive however thrive by way of 12 phrases by mixing thrifty pragmatism with open-armed populism.
Although she leaned barely to the political left, she didn’t hew to a celebration platform or ideology. Her singular objective was to deliver prosperity to Mississauga, which she did by holding budgets trim — the town hardly ever carried debt or raised property taxes — and being unafraid to say her metropolis’s pursuits towards its neighbors or within the Ontario provincial authorities.
“Hazel McCallion doesn’t warning,” the journal Toronto Life wrote in 2003. “She berates. She harangues. She, nicely, bites off individuals’s heads.”
But when politicians and bureaucrats feared her, voters beloved her.
After she determined to not run for re-election in 2014, she picked her successor, Bonnie Crombie, who gained handily. Nobody was stunned: Mrs. McCallion left workplace with an 85 p.c approval score. They referred to as her Hurricane Hazel, a tribute to her brash type greater than a reference to the climate catastrophe that killed 80 individuals in Toronto in 1954.
Her status was cemented simply months after she took workplace, when a prepare carrying tons of poisonous and flammable chemical compounds overturned close to the center of Mississauga. She instantly ordered a lot of the city, some 220,000 residents, to evacuate. Over a number of days she was there alongside the police and firefighters, ushering individuals to security, undeterred by an ankle sprained alongside the way in which.
And when it was over, she was fierce in her demand for damages.
“It is going to be an astronomical sum,” she instructed reporters, “and someone goes to get the invoice.”
Mrs. McCallion performed skilled hockey within the Nineteen Thirties, and she or he remained the image of ruddy well being by way of her time as mayor, a indisputable fact that endeared her to voters. Even into her 80s, she carried a hockey stick in her automotive trunk, in case she got here throughout a recreation. She fished, hiked and as soon as, when she was 87, biked 5 miles to work to advertise alternate options to driving.
She had come to politics from a profession with an engineering firm, beginning in 1964 as a candidate for a municipal workplace in Streetsville, a village inside Mississauga’s borders. After the 2 entities, together with a number of others, mixed to create the town of Mississauga, she moved effortlessly into the mayor’s workplace after defeating the incumbent by simply 3,000 votes in her 1978 race.
She by no means confronted one other severe opponent, and in two of her elections she didn’t face one in any respect, profitable by acclamation. She did this with out campaigning or fund-raising; she inspired supporters wanting to open their wallets to present to charity as an alternative.
“I don’t run a marketing campaign, as you realize,” she instructed the Canadian Press information company in 2010. “I’m there with them 4 years. I don’t look forward to an election to return alongside to marketing campaign.”
She was Mississauga’s chief booster, selling it as a dynamic place that welcomed the companies and the inflow of immigrants coming into Canada within the Seventies and ’80s.
She was not with out critics, who thought-about her imperious and even dictatorial. And he or she conceded that she stored a decent grip on the Mississauga Metropolis Council, permitting little dissent, no less than in public.
In 1982 and once more in 2009, she was accused of failing to reveal conflicts of curiosity: first when land she and her husband owned was included in a potential growth challenge, and later when she lobbied for a resort challenge through which one in every of her sons was an investor.
The primary occasion was not unlawful on the time, and the second, which did go to courtroom, was thrown out by a choose in 2013. Taken collectively, it was a file her defenders thought-about remarkably clear for a political profession that started earlier than most of her voters had been born.
Hazel Journeaux was born on Feb. 14, 1921, in Port-Daniel, a small city on the Gaspé Peninsula in southeast Quebec. Her father, Herbert, ran a fishing and processing firm, and her mom, Amanda (Travers) Journeaux, was a nurse.
The household moved to Montreal when Hazel was nonetheless a baby, and after highschool she took secretarial and enterprise courses earlier than being employed by M.W. Kellogg, an engineering firm.
She spent a number of years as an expert hockey participant in Montreal, cementing a lifelong love for the game. She performed middle for a staff sponsored by Kick, a cola model, and made $5 a recreation, the equal of about $65 in U.S. {dollars} at present. In 1987 the Girls’s World Hockey Championship named its trophy the Hazel McCallion World Cup.
Her hockey profession resulted in 1940, when Kellogg opened an workplace in Toronto and she or he was despatched to handle it.
She married Sam McCallion in 1951. He died in 1997. She is survived by her sons, Peter and Paul; her daughter, Linda Burgess; and a granddaughter.
Mrs. McCallion spent greater than twenty years as a supervisor with Kellogg earlier than leaving to work together with her husband and his printing enterprise, and to become involved in politics in Streetsville. After three years on the village council, she was elected mayor of Streetsville in 1970.
After the creation of the town of Mississauga, she served on its council for 4 years earlier than being elected mayor in 1978 at age 57.
Earlier than, throughout and after her time as mayor, she led a backbreaking workday, rising at 5:30 and beginning conferences at 7. She swatted away questions on leaving workplace, even lengthy after most individuals her age would have retired.
“Having time on my palms shouldn’t be acceptable,” she instructed The Toronto Star in 2001, when she was 80. “If I give up, I’d have to seek out one thing very difficult to do. And what may very well be tougher than being mayor?”
After she lastly did finish her run as mayor in 2014, at 93, she continued to work. She served as the primary chancellor of the Hazel McCallion Campus of Sheridan Faculty, a Toronto-area technical college; she suggested Mr. Ford, the Ontario premier; and she or he oversaw the Better Toronto Airport Authority, a job that in 2019 took her on a tour of the world’s busiest airports.
In a 2022 interview with the newspaper The Nationwide Put up, she summed up her philosophy by recalling one thing her mom would ask her when she was younger: “What do you need to accomplish in life? Do you need to be a follower or do you need to make the most of alternatives to be a pacesetter?”
