'Hurricane Hazel' saves a city

Tomorrow in Toronto, the world's oldest mayor, Mrs Hazel McCallion, will receive the Emperor of Japan's Order of the Rising Sun for twinning her Canadian city, Mississauga, with Kariya city in Japan.

As the feisty 93-year-old told The Sunday Times last Monday on the sidelines of the World Cities Summit here: "This award is a big deal for me. And Kariya is the only sister city that Mississauga has in the world, with which we have wonderful exchanges of citizens, sports clubs and service groups."

In her 36 years as mayor, the steely-eyed grandmother with a pin-sharp memory has run Mississauga as tightly as if it were a multinational company, prompting many to call her the Margaret Thatcher of Canada as well as Hurricane Hazel for her no-nonsense efficiency.

Japan admired that and so today, she exults, there are 82 Japanese businesses operating in her city of 760,000 people, which is on the outskirts of Toronto and is Canada's sixth-largest city.

Mississauga is 40 years old, and Mrs McCallion has been mayor for 36 of those years. The city was formed in 1974 by merging the towns of Mississauga, Port Credit and Streetsville, the last of which she was mayor from 1970 to 1973.

Among Mississauga's most famous sons is the late jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, who was her "very good friend".

Asked why she ran her city like a business, the widow, former office manager and former newspaper owner said: "I was a Depression Kid. I've learnt that a big part of success is good financial planning, so you don't do something if you don't have the money to do it. That's how I run my city."

Mississauga was debt-ridden when she became its mayor in 1978.

But she turned it around in five years and was debt-free up until last year, when she splurged on a better public transport system and LED-powered street lights.

Her trip here last week was her first to Singapore, and she said she wished she could implement some of the city-state's strict laws on crimes and littering back home.

Not surprisingly, Canada's political parties have tried to get her elected to a national or provincial post.

But she turned all of them down because "you can't be independent if you belong to a party. You have to follow the party line.

Whereas at the local level, I've worked hard to attain what I've attained.

"It's far more satisfying to be in local government because I'm close to the people. You can't get away with giving them excuses; when you go shopping or to church or for sports, you're meeting them".

Nobody in Mississauga calls her Mrs McCallion, she added, and she liked nothing better than to hear the city's schoolchildren yell "Hey, Hazel!" whenever they spot her in the street.

She did, however, rue having "sacrificed a lot of family time" with her two sons, her daughter and late husband Sam, who founded the Streetsville Booster newspaper.

What she found most satisfying was growing her city from its original 220,000-strong population to 760,000 today and getting an average 87 per cent approval rating for her efforts.

She has become so synonymous with the city that she won every mayoral election in the past 12 years without even campaigning. That is not to say that no one wants her job.

In 2010, Mississauga city councillor Carolyn Parrish tried to unseat her by dragging her to court on charges that Mrs McCallion gave her son Peter business, in conflict with her duties as mayor.

Mrs McCallion won the case, but rued that Ms Parrish's "viciousness" had cost taxpayers 7.5 million Canadian dollars (S$8.6 million) in legal fees.

Her political career proved to be Teflon-like.

In 1979, just a year after she was elected mayor of Mississauga, a Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) train derailed, causing a chlorine tank to rupture.

This sent killer fumes into the air, but Mrs McCallion managed to marshal all local, provincial and national government agencies to evacuate all 220,000 of her city dwellers and resettle them in hotels or private homes in other parts of Canada.

CPR's hotel bill alone for the disaster, she recalled, was 10 million Canadian dollars.

Amid all this, she sprained her ankle badly after slipping on wet grass during a television interview about the disaster.

But she continued to give everyone in the city updates and encouragment throughout the crisis.

She recalled: "I didn't go to bed for three nights. The adrenaline kept running and I just had to do keep going.

"I mean, people were being evacuated in their nightclothes. People with tubes in them were being wheeled out of hospital operating rooms into ambulances."

That and many more vivid memories will stay with her when she finally retires in November.

She mused: "I think young girls, especially, look up to me. I tell them, 'Any job that a man can do, a woman can do.'

"A young lady assigned to take care of me at the World Cities Summit is an engineer. That pleased me. I told her, 'Great!'"

This article was first published on June 8, 2014.
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