An Ontario Superior Court judge has dismissed a conflict of interest complaint against Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion.

The decision means McCallion, 92, will not be forced to step down after 35 years on the job.

The ruling released Friday morning followed an hearing held by Justice John Sproat into votes McCallion took in 2007 at the Region of Peel that stood to save World Class Developments – her son’s company – $11 million in development charges.

“In my opinion, a reasonable elector, appraised of all of the circumstances as of the votes, would not regard the deemed financial interest of Mayor McCallion as likely to have influenced her vote,” he wrote.

Photo gallery:Hazel McCallion

Mississauga resident Elias Hazineh had alleged that those votes were a clear violation of the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act.

However, Sproat also ruled that the application was brought too late, as Hazineh testified in an affidavit that he read about the votes at the region in a 2010 newspaper article, so must have known about the issue well before the deadline to file a conflict application had passed.

Sproat further ruled the chances of the votes benefiting WCD were minuscule and it was likely WCD wouldn’t have even qualified for the lower development fees.

McCallion is the longest serving elected official in Canada. Her name adorns university buildings, schools, libraries and hospital wings across Mississauga.

Thousands of adoring supporters voted her into office 10 times as mayor of Mississauga since 1978 (she was acclaimed twice) for a tenure that saw tax increases kept close to zero per cent for almost two decades while developers built out the city and kept its coffers full.

She has said that, regardless of today’s decision, the current term would be her final one as mayor.

In 1982, McCallion was found guilty of a conflict of interest in another case. In that instance, she had voted on a land purchase deal and pushed councillors to support her, even though a staff recommendation went against McCallion, whose family could have benefited directly from the deal.

She was not removed from office in the 1982 case because the judge ruled her actions were an error in judgment.

In 2011 she again escaped any serious damage when the Mississauga Judicial Inquiry, probing the mayor’s involvement with her son’s downtown development project, found she did not violate the narrow scope of the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act because she declared a conflict when the WCD plan was dealt with at city council.

However, inquiry commissioner Justice Douglas Cunningham found McCallion broke common law principles by effectively using her office and influence behind the scenes to push the project through.

The current case also involved the WCD project. The complaint centred on the fact that McCallion failed to declare a conflict when development charge issues affecting WCD were dealt with at the Region of Peel.

Peter McCallion was a principal of World Class Developments when it was planning to build a $1.5 billion downtown hotel-convention centre that McCallion had wanted desperately for years.

Sproat rejected the argument by McCallion’s lawyer that she didn’t know her son was a principal of WCD.

In September 2007 McCallion moved motions and took votes to extend the development charge grandfather period so existing projects could pay substantially lower fees, instead of new, higher development fees that were being brought in by the region.

She and her lawyers testified that she did not declare a conflict because all developers with plans in the pipeline would have benefited, an argument that Sproat rejected in Friday’s decision.

Hazineh’s lawyer Tom Richardson was commended by the judge at the conclusion of hearings in April for putting together such a well researched argument. Richardson argued that, of all the projects that were in the pipeline at the time of the votes, WCD’s was by far the biggest and stood to save $11 million with the grandfathered fees – much more than any of the other projects.

In testimony during examinations, a WCD consultant stated that WCD was working feverishly to meet the grandfather deadlines set by the votes McCallion participated in, as it would have saved the fledgling company a large sum of money.

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In his application, Hazineh sought to prevent McCallion from running for office for seven years, which meant she would be almost 100 before she could seek office again. After the case was brought forward, she said that, regardless of the outcome, this would be her last term.

McCallion enjoyed a run of more than two decades during which she won elections with about 90 per cent support, and eventually even stopped campaigning.

In recent years, she became more of a celebrity than a municipal politician, frequently appearing on popular TV shows in Canada and south of the border.

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