MAYORAL RACE: 20 candidates will do battle to become next mayor of Mississauga

The field is set in the race to find the seventh mayor in Mississauga’s history.

With nominations in the city’s mayoral byelection closing Friday at 2 p.m., 20 names remained on the list of candidates seeking to succeed Bonnie Crombie, who bolted Canada’s seventh-largest city in January to lead the Ontario Liberal Party.

The field dropped by one, from 21 at close of business Thursday, as Peter Tolias elected to remove himself from contention. Tolias signed up as a candidate back on March 6, the first day of nominations.

A six-week byelection campaign now kicks into gear before Mississauga voters elect a new mayor and Ward 5 councillor on June 10. The Ward 5 seat was vacated when longtime councillor Carolyn Parrish left the post in March to run in the mayoral race.

After several weeks during which no new candidates threw their hats into the mayoral byelection ring, two days ago Crombie’s ex-husband entered the race to succeed her.

And yesterday, Peter McCallion, son of 36-year Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion (held office from 1978 until 2014), dropped out of the byelection. He ran unsuccessfully for the Ward 9 council seat in the 2022 municipal election, losing to Martin Reid.

Mississauga has never seen so many candidates run for mayor.

Current city councillors Stephen Dasko (Ward 1), Alvin Tedjo (Ward 2) and Dipika Damerla (Ward 7) are running to succeed Crombie as well.

Others entered in the race are:

• Zulfiqar Ali
• Diya Atassi
• Brian Crombie
• Jamie Dookie
• Frank Fang
• Xiaohua Gong
• Winston Harding
• Sara Iqbal
• Syed Jaffery
• Mohsin Khan
• Mitchell MacEachern
• Sinisa Mandrapa
• Mike Matulewicz
• David Shaw
• George Tavares
• Nathalie Xian Yi Yan

The winner among mayoral hopefuls will become the seventh mayor of Mississauga, following Robert Speck (1968-72), Chic Murray (1972-73), Martin Dobkin (1973-76), Ron Searle (1976-78), Hazel McCallion (1978-2014) and Bonnie Crombie (2014-24).

Here’s the list of the 15 Ward 5 candidates:

• Omer Abdalla
• Hamid Akbar
• Amir Ali
• Kristin Dattoo
• Jordan Gray
• Natalie Hart
• Imran Hasan
• Ehsan Khandaker
• Bradley MacDonald
• Tazeen Rizvi
• Rosemarie Sanchez Sanchez
• Manish Sawhney
• Shelly Scott-England
• Danny Singh
• Rana Zia