Torontonians identify with their city, Mississaugans with their mayor.

In Toronto, the people rise up to protect the city from the mayor. In Mississauga, they line up to protect the mayor from the city.

Not even Toronto’s chief magistrate, Rob Ford, whose brother was the city’s unelected vice-mayor until recently, would attempt the stunts Hazel McCallion pulls off routinely.

Though a judicial review found the long-serving mayor of Canada’s sixth-largest city in a clear conflict of interest promoting a failed real estate scheme that involved her son, many of the people of Mississauga have rushed to her defence.

However touching, their sympathy is badly misplaced. Indeed, Mississauga’s reaction to McCallion’s misdeeds is so inappropriate one can’t help but wonder what Mississaugans are so afraid of. Why has their fear of cutting the umbilical cord kept them tied to McCallion for more than three decades?

Such an extreme case of arrested civic development is rare, even in a system where the advantages of incumbency can be insurmountable. But in the normal course of events, incumbency eventually becomes a liability. Think of Brian Mulroney, who won the largest majority of any Canadian prime minister then left his party with two sitting members.

Perhaps in a disparate and disconnected post-war agglomeration such as Mississauga, it’s natural that McCallion should have come to personify the city; she and Mississauga are interchangeable in people’s minds. The one wouldn’t exist without the other.

Except, of course, that it would.

Even if McCallion were the best mayor in Christendom (which she’s not), 32 years in power is too long. She has squelched a generation of leadership and systematically rendered council impotent. There is no “loyal opposition” in Mississauga; the only person who matters is the mayor.

McCallion didn’t even bother to campaign during the last municipal election. She doesn’t feel she needs to — and she’s right. But the nicety of a platform, of a few ideas, a handful of proposals, a hint or two of direction, might have helped lessen the impression that she now considers herself mayor-for-life.

Something as complex as building a city needs input from more than one person, especially since McCallion’s vision amounts to little more than the usual sprawl. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of Mississaugas across the continent, many facing huge financial problems caused by decades of civic governments whose single priority was keeping taxes low.

As even McCallion has come to realize, that’s a dead end. Mississauga’s minimal services mean it’s ill-prepared to deal with a future of peak-oil prices, paralytic gridlock and infrastructural decay.

But at this point, McCallion believes she alone knows what’s best for Mississauga, to hell with conflict of interest. She made that clear Monday, when, despite a damning report from Justice Douglas Cunningham, she felt no need to apologize. Sticking to the narrowest possible interpretation of the rules, McCallion completely missed the point of the exercise.

In a more mature, robust and engaged community, such behaviour would be unacceptable. In Mississauga, where only a quarter of voters show up, few care.

Whatever that city’s values may be, democracy isn’t among them. Here is the city apathy built. Barely a city, in fact, it hardly exists outside its maker’s mind, which must be why Mississaugans remain so attached to McCallion. She’s all that keeps them from the suburban oblivion into which much of North America has fallen.

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Or so they think. Already Mississauga has started to reinvent itself — at least on paper. Still, higher densities and decent transit, prerequisites to urbanity, are missing. In their place, there’s only Hazel McCallion.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca

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