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Hazel McCallion, who because the longest-serving mayor in Canadian historical past remodeled the sleepy Toronto suburb of Mississauga right into a multicultural dynamo and the nation’s sixth-largest metropolis, died at her residence there on Jan. 29, 9 years after she ended her 36-year run. She was 101.
Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario and a detailed buddy of Mrs. McCallion’s, stated she died from pancreatic most cancers.
When Mrs. McCallion first received workplace, in 1978, Mississauga was a sprawling centerless neighborhood of about 250,000 individuals, little greater than an extension of Toronto, its a lot bigger neighbor to the east. Right now it has a dense downtown core of skyscrapers, sturdy arts establishments and 750,000 individuals.
And whereas Mississauga within the Nineteen Seventies was overwhelmingly white, town is now one among Canada’s most numerous, 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 carry prosperity to Mississauga, which she did by protecting budgets trim — town not often carried debt or raised property taxes — and being unafraid to claim her metropolis’s pursuits in opposition to 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, properly, bites off individuals’s heads.”
But when politicians and bureaucrats feared her, voters cherished her.
After she determined to not run for re-election in 2014, she picked her successor, Bonnie Crombie, who received handily. Nobody was shocked: Mrs. McCallion left workplace with an 85 p.c approval ranking. 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 repute was cemented simply months after she took workplace, when a prepare carrying tons of poisonous and flammable chemical substances 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.
“Will probably be an astronomical sum,” she informed reporters, “and someone goes to get the invoice.”
Mrs. McCallion performed skilled hockey within the Thirties, and he or she remained the image of ruddy well being by way of her time as mayor, a proven fact that endeared her to voters. Even into her 80s, she carried a hockey stick in her automobile trunk, in case she got here throughout a sport. She fished, hiked and as soon as, when she was 87, biked 5 miles to work to advertise 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 couple of others, mixed to create 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 provide to charity as an alternative.
“I don’t run a marketing campaign, as you realize,” she informed the Canadian Press information company in 2010. “I’m there with them 4 years. I don’t await an election to come back 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 Nineteen Seventies and ’80s.
She was not with out critics, who thought-about her imperious and even dictatorial. And she or he conceded that she saved a good grip on the Mississauga Metropolis Council, permitting little dissent, a minimum of 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 attainable growth challenge, and later when she lobbied for a lodge challenge through which one among 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 decide in 2013. Taken collectively, it was a document her defenders thought-about remarkably clear for a political profession that started earlier than most of her voters have 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 knowledgeable 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 sport, the equal of about $65 in U.S. {dollars} as we speak. In 1987 the Ladies’s World Hockey Championship named its trophy the Hazel McCallion World Cup.
Her hockey profession led to 1940, when Kellogg opened an workplace in Toronto and he or she 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 20 years as a supervisor with Kellogg earlier than leaving to work along 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 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 fingers just isn’t acceptable,” she informed The Toronto Star in 2001, when she was 80. “If I give up, I’d have to search out one thing very difficult to do. And what might be more difficult 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 School, a Toronto-area technical college; she suggested Mr. Ford, the Ontario premier; and he or she oversaw the Larger 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 Submit, she summed up her philosophy by recalling one thing her mom would ask her when she was younger: “What do you wish to accomplish in life? Do you wish to be a follower or do you wish to benefit from alternatives to be a pacesetter?”
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