Mississauga’s new mayor is Carolyn Parrish

Longtime municipal politician Carolyn Parrish is Mississauga’s new mayor.

Parrish, who has served on Mississauga city council for 13 years in addition to the same amount of time spent as an MP in Ottawa, fended off her three main challengers in Mississauga’s mayoral byelection tonight to succeed Bonnie Crombie, who left in January to lead the Ontario Liberal Party.

With 100 per cent of polls reporting as of 10 p.m., Parrish topped a largest-ever field of 20 candidates for the city’s top seat, garnering 43,494 votes. Current Mississauga councillors Alvin Tedjo (35,005), Dipika Damerla (27,119) and Stephen Dasko (22,408) finished second through fourth, respectively.

David Shaw, who has previously run for mayor, was a distant fifth (2,843) while Brian Crombie, ex-husband of Bonnie Crombie, was sixth (2,242).

Parrish resigned from the Ward 5 council seat in March to run for mayor. That vacancy on council was also filled in tonight’s byelection, with Natalie Hart earning 3,707 votes to finish first in a 15-candidate field.

Speaking to reporters at the Mississauga Convention Centre after the race had been decided, Parrish said she wasn’t overly concerned by recent polls that showed her three main competitors appeared to be closing the gap on her.

Parrish had led more comfortably in earlier polling before deciding a month or so ago she wasn’t going to take part in any additional all-candidates debates.

In a brief victory speech, the veteran politician who has become known the past two decades or so for being at times brash and outspoken — both in Mississauga and Ottawa — tossed aside prepared remarks mid-stream to speak “off script.”

“I’m not going to read all this,” she declared to a boisterous and responsive crowd of supporters. “It’s way too much.”

Notes set aside, the city’s new mayor told the large crowd her first order of business will be to link arms with fellow Peel mayors in Brampton and Caledon and march to Queen’s Park — and Ottawa if necessary — to fight for a fair share for the three municipalities when it comes to funding received for social services.

“The region (of Peel) is going to be stronger now because you’re going to have three mayors that actually get along,” Parrish began, “and we will be formidable when we go to Queen’s Park or to Ottawa to tell them we need our fair share of funding here (in Peel).

“As you all know, I can be quite charming,” she quipped, the remark eliciting the expected laughter from the crowd. “And you also know I can be quite forceful. We’re going to mix charm and force and we’re going to take over the world.”

The candidates were vying to become the seventh mayor in Mississauga’s history, if you go back earlier than 1974, when Mississauga became a city.

Here are the other candidates who ran in the mayoral byelection:

• 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

Carolyn Parrish

Stephen Dasko

Dipika Damerla

Alvin Tedjo