Mississauga is, from one perspective, stuck in a kind of urban limbo. A city that grew rapidly around highways and greenfield sprawl has filled in its boundaries and is now surrounded by other growing cities, meaning the low-hanging fruit of cheap and rapid growth has all been picked. Other cities have been here before and faced the immense pressure to start growing up instead of out, but the unstoppable force of urban geometry always collides with the immovable object of recalcitrant local politics.
Alvin Tedjo understands that dilemma intimately: he grew up in a Mississauga neighbourhood that’s now the site of the M3 condo tower — which will be the tallest residential Canadian building outside of Toronto proper — but is predictably not far from streets of Mississauga’s more traditional single-family homes.
“When you walk around my old neighbourhood, you have this sense of all these towers surrounding you without a good enough transition,” Tedjo told TVO Today in an interview this week. “We need more missing middle housing everywhere in the city, and we need to make it easier for single-family homeowners and smaller builders to be able to help fill the gap as opposed to relying on the larger developers to to do it.”
Tedjo isn’t just wishing and hoping. On Friday he’ll register to run for mayor of Mississauga for the second time in two years, offering voters a plan he says can help Mississauga grow out of its gawky urban adolescence. He previously ran for the Ontario Liberal leadership in 2020, and then for mayor of Mississauga in the summer of 2024, after Bonnie Crombie had resigned to become leader of those same Liberals. He earned a competitive 25 per cent of the vote; Carolyn Parrish, who is also expected to run again, prevailed in that race with 31 per cent. Some speculate Crombie herself may also return to her old political stomping grounds, presenting a challenger like Tedjo with a daunting task: he could face both an incumbent (Parrish) and her immediate predecessor (Crombie) whose time as mayor is still reasonably fresh in people’s minds.
“I think people are ready to move beyond the politics of the past. I think they are ready to grow up as a city and they're looking for someone who has the energy and the ideas to take us into the next phase of being a big city,” says Tedjo.
There’s a third person who looms large in the race, albeit not as a candidate: Premier Doug Ford. Ford, who declared Mark Saunders would be the best choice in Toronto’s 2023 mayoral byelection, insisted “I never get involved in municipal elections, but I will send an army down here to make sure I support Mayor Parrish.”
Tedjo has been an outspoken critic of Ford: he recently appeared at Queen’s Park to speak about proposed changes to regional municipalities and accuses the premier of “creating policy based on his commute to work.”
Commuting pain is the bread and butter of municipal politics in the GTA, with mayoral elections filled with candidates promising to ease traffic woes. Tedjo says he’ll ask voters to support the bus rapid transit plan he previously offered in the 2024 byelection, saying that Mississauga needs more than just the Hazel McCallion LRT line (which won’t open for at least another two years).
Tedjo is also proposing to implement a property tax grace period, saying that Mississauga has been collecting late fines from taxpayers at twice the rates city staff had projected — a sign, he says, that people are facing real affordability challenges in the city right now and need some flexibility from their local government.
But his focus on housing policy caught my attention. From this writer’s perspective as a housing obsessive living outside of Mississauga, the city has hardly been a laggard on the housing file under Parrish, certainly not when compared to other cities in the GTA.
Tedjo acknowledged that the city has taken some big swings on housing policy, including steep cuts to some development charges. (The councillor did not miss the opportunity to say that moves like that need provincial funding to be sustainable.) But he says that there’s more to be done, as policy intentions get bogged down in the details of implementation.
“We need to remove the red tape that currently exists in terms of the application process. …And even when we did things like allowing certain size properties to be severed, we're still forcing them to go through committee of adjustment and going through hoops,” Tedjo says. “While in principle, we have passed a number of things that should make it easier to build, in talking with homeowners who are trying to do this, they've discovered that there are still many, many, many barriers that exist that make it much harder for them to actually build.
But Tedjo is pitching a different vision of Mississauga’s future as well — he’s betting that traditionally small-C conservative suburban voters are willing to embrace big changes.
“We have a lot of seniors aging in-place who are reaching the end of their time in their homes, but they want something else. They want to stay in their community because that's how they live their lives, that's how they thrive and it's better health-wise for them to stay in their community,” Tedjo says. “Sometimes missing middle housing can be that option. They can build a garden suite for themselves and then move into that while still getting income from their main house. They can sever their lot. They can rebuild. They can move to a new [type of] housing development within the community which was previously illegal.”
“We're trying to help people stay together. We're trying to help families stay together, whether they're grandparents, or kids who are growing up.”
It’s a gamble, and one he could easily lose. Other politicians around North America have struggled to turn housing reform into a winning election pitch, not least because voters are frequently skeptical that new construction in their neighbourhoods will translate into affordable housing. But after generations of being on a divergent path from Toronto, Mississauga is in the same kind of predicament as far as urban growth goes: they’ve grown out as far as they can, and for now there’s nowhere to go but up.