Last week members of Mississauga City Council voted to explore leaving the Regional Municipality of Peel. This isn’t the first time this subject has come up in Mississauga—it was a recurring issue for former mayor Hazel McCallion—but the latest motion comes as the city is reckoning with its own changing status in Peel Region, as well as the future of Brampton and Caledon. What’s going on in Peel Region, Ontario’s second largest municipality?
Mississauga is the biggest city in Peel—but for how long?
The direct cause of last week’s vote was a long-standing dispute over the makeup of the Peel Region’s council. There are 25 seats at the regional council, including each of the three cities’ mayors as well as a chair, appointed by council. Of those seats, Mississauga gets 12—just less than half—despite having 55 per cent of the region’s population. This leads to votes on contentious regional issues where Mississauga can be out-voted by Brampton and Caledon.
In particular, Caledon’s representation at Peel Region was repeatedly raised as an irritant at last week’s meeting: Caledon has five seats (20 per cent of the total) despite accounting for less than five per cent of the region’s population. Meanwhile, Brampton has 40 per cent of the region’s population, but only 28 per cent of the representation.
Caledon Mayor Allan Thompson says he’s heard these criticisms before.
“It’s almost like Groundhog Day—here we go again,” says Thompson. “We’re all partners at the regional table. At Caledon we’re 56 per cent of the landmass … we’re all paying our share into the region.”
Thompson is not interested in seeing Caledon’s presence at the region shrink, saying that would leave an area as big as Mississauga and Brampton combined with poor democratic representation.
Peel Region is undergoing a review of its governance structure at the moment to address exactly these issues.
“There’s been some suggestion that Mississauga has carried the region’s weight for many years,” says Mississauga councillor Karen Ras. Ras is skeptical of the merits of breaking away from Peel Region, and suggests that the city should see what the result of the governance review is before considering anything more drastic.
But the status quo is changing rapidly: while Mississauga added roughly 45,000 people between 2006-11, Brampton added double that number (90,100) and future growth in Brampton and Caledon is likely to be more rapid than in Mississauga.
Do taxes from Mississauga flow north?
The makeup of regional council is something that could at least hypothetically be reformed. A more fundamental question is where tax dollars from the various cities flow. According to Mississauga councillor Carolyn Parrish, her hometown makes up 60 per cent of the property tax base in the region, but that money overwhelmingly flows to infrastructure and services provided regionally, and benefiting Brampton and Caledon more than Mississauga.
“They are over-represented on any basis you want to look at, and living with big city amenities on small town taxes,” Parrish told TVO.org in an email this week. “Mississauga is ready and able, in fact long overdue, to stand on our own and control our own destiny.”
Infrastructure funding is also going to increasingly divide Peel’s three cities: Mississauga is at the end of its boom years, and like Toronto has basically built out to its borders. That means building more densely and building better transit. But transit (for one) isn’t provided by regional government, so Mississauga is on its own there. Pro-separation councillors worry that as Mississauga enters its growing-up phase, it will have to carry more of its own infrastructure weight while also funding Brampton and Caledon’s rapid growth.
Ras says infrastructure isn’t the only thing the region funds. Peel also funds some of the biggest services any Ontario municipality has, whether that’s police, garbage collection, sewer and water service or affordable housing. Those services would still need to be delivered.
“The region does a lot of the heavy lifting,” Ras says. “What problem are we actually trying to solve?”
Where’s the growth going?
One relatively low-profile issue behind the acrimony is a fight last year over Caledon’s future within Peel Region’s growth. Ontario cities in the Greater Toronto Area have targets for growth they must meet according to provincial policies, including for density. Caledon had long resisted those policies: former mayor Marolyn Morrison explicitly ran against the growth plan in 2010. In 2015, the fight, between Caledon on the one hand and Mississauga and Brampton on the other, broke into the open with Caledon councillors walking out of regional council meetings. The issue will now be settled with provincial mediation—meaning the province’s policies will very likely rule the day.
While Parrish referred to Caledon as a “country club” during last week’s debate, Ras said she didn’t think the acrimony over growth, or any one disagreement over policy, was driving the push for separation at Misssissauga council.
“For Mississauga, it’s been a longstanding issue … for many here, it’s been a thorn in their side,” Ras says.
What would replace it?
There are two possible ways for Mississauga to exit Peel, though only one had any real support at council last week. The most popular proposal would be to simply turn Mississauga into a single-tier municipality that doesn’t share any jurisdiction (or tax dollars) with Brampton or Caledon. That’s precisely what Mayor Bonnie Crombie proposed to her colleagues on council, and what she defended in a statement after the vote. In Ontario, a “single-tier” municipality is one that doesn’t share its powers with a higher or lower partner. That includes the City of Toronto (ever since it was amalgamated) but also places such as Atikokan, London, or Timmins.
The other solution that was offered by councillor Jim Tovey—and that elicited some groans at council—was to convert Peel Region into one large single-tier city. In effect, Peel would go through the same amalgamation that Toronto and other Ontario cities did in the late-1990s under the last Progressive Conservative government.
“Don’t do anything hasty, but I want to see a business case that looks at the issue from the top down and the bottom up,” Tovey told council.
So, is Peel Region going to split apart?
It’s very unlikely. For one, Mississauga can’t do anything on its own. Any move to break up the Peel Region would need to start by amending provincial law. Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Ted McMeekin told TVO.org that he hasn’t received any formal request from Mississauga council yet, but if and when he does it’s not clear it will get a positive treatment if it comes from that city alone.
“In general, I expect all municipalities to work together in the principal of cooperation and economic fairness,” McMeekin says. “Any proposal that comes across my desk needs to take into account the effect on the entire region, including Caledon and Brampton.”
Even if Peel Region were able to work out some kind of amicable divorce, the provincial government might not want to open that door. There are still simmering resentments over the amalgamation of Toronto almost 20 years after the fact, and allowing a similar change next door could open a much larger fight in Toronto.
Nevertheless, Crombie and others have suggested the issue should be put to a referendum in the 2018 municipal elections.
Map by Michael Lehan