The latest in Mississauga leaving Peel Region
Published March 8, 2023 at 10:35 am
Ever optimistic that Mississauga will at long last achieve political independence from Peel Region, Mayor Bonnie Crombie said this week that “divorce proceedings” are underway.
But that doesn’t mean the breakup of Peel Region is imminent or will even happen at all.
That decision rests with the provincial government and it has not tipped its hand either way.
To provide some historical context, the City of Mississauga’s fight for its right to leave Peel dates back decades to the early part of former mayor Hazel McCallion’s time in office, and no provincial government of those days sided with Mississauga on the matter.
Still, in an Instagram interview with insauga.com publisher Khaled Iwamura this week, Crombie expressed optimism that the political separation might finally take place.
She and her council have been even more aggressively pushing for independence the last year or so, most recently discussing the matter at a Feb. 15 session of council.
The mayor told insauga.com that Mississauga is waiting for facilitators to be appointed by the provincial government to talk to City officials about assets, liabilities, revenues and other matters that would have to be addressed should there be any political changes in Peel.
“They will analyze who owns what and how that will be separated and how they could…create utilities and things like water, wastewater…,” Crombie said in the Instagram interview.
Also to be discussed in any separation, the mayor continued, would be matters such as the Region of Peel headquarters in Brampton that houses council chambers and various regional offices, and what to do with it.
“It’s in Brampton, but owned by all. (It’s an) asset that would be sold and funding redistributed,” said Crombie, who then concluded, “Let’s call it divorce proceedings; who owns what and who gets equitable share of the proceeds.”
One viewer who commented on the Instagram interview online said Crombie is making a complicated situation sound too simple.
“Residents have the right to know how this will affect their cost of living in the city and the services we already pay for,” the commenter noted. “More information and clarification are needed and the input of residents should be sought once the full picture is painted for them before pushing this agenda forward.”
Crombie and Mississauga councillors remain insistent that Canada’s seventh-largest city needs to split from Peel and forge an independent political path moving forward.
Such a move would lead to a savings in Mississauga of $1 billion, Crombie suggested.
What Mississauga and its nearly 830,000 residents do not need, Crombie stressed during a City council meeting last month, is to be lumped into a new megacity along with current Peel partners Brampton and Caledon.
That idea, which Mississauga’s mayor and councillors argue would greatly disadvantage their citizens, was floated once again in February when Ontario Premier Doug Ford spoke about the matter at a Brampton news conference.
Ford and his government are looking for ways in which to reduce or eliminate municipal duplication in Peel and several other municipalities across the province. Forming a Peel megacity is one option that has been discussed, but Ford is on record as saying recently that he supports a move in the other direction–Mississauga and Brampton becoming standalone cities.
Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown is also in favour of such a move.
Ford said his government will at some point sit down with Peel’s mayors to talk about the issue.
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