Now that Hazel McCallion has retired, the inmates of the Mississauga municipal kindergarten are bidding to take control of their land of milk and cookies. In their first rebellious act, they are threatening to poop their pants unless they get a fully funded rapid-transit line from new Principal Kathleen Wynne at no cost to themselves.

It’s as if the infantile politics that afflicted Toronto for such a long four years has fled west to make a new stand on the banks of the Credit. Even the new mayor, Bonnie Crombie, is taking part. Invoking a previously undisclosed (i.e. nonexistent) agreement that the province would pay the whole cost of the planned $1.6-billion LRT on Hurontario Street, Crombie recently complained to the Star’s San Grewal it would be unfair to expect Mississauga to pitch in anything “at the 12th hour.”

In vain does the adult observer point to Mississauga’s own documentation of the project, which clearly states that municipal funding will be needed to build the line. Or the fact that senior governments have never paid the whole cost of any rapid transit project in the history of Ontario. Mississauga is special. It refuses to grow up.

That in fact is the essence of council’s threatened response to the conventional expectation that it begin to pay its own way in the world. Not only will it refuse to have proper transit, it will “say no to provincially mandated growth,” according to Councillor Nando Iannicca. Council reportedly considers this threat to be a “harsh ultimatum” to the province, which favours policies to boost development and assessment in places like Mississauga.

Mississauga’s mooted “ultimatum” is a new variation on the type of protest once favoured among western Doukhobors: Give us what we want or we’ll burn our own house down!

And if that doesn’t work, Mississauga council will hold its breath until it turns blue.

What makes the performance all the more disreputable is the fact that Mississauga can easily afford to pay its fair share of the new line’s costs. Thanks mainly to fate (its location), the province (endless subsidies) and grown-up leadership (McCallion), Mississauga today is as wealthy as a Canadian municipality could possibly be. Its commercial and industrial assessment is the envy of all, its property taxes are competitively low and its municipal debt is both minuscule and, as the city is proud to point out, Triple-A rated.

You can learn all this and more in the city’s 2015 budget, although you won’t find a dime set aside there to help build the LRT. What you do see, however, is ample capacity to do the job.

Until recently, Mississauga relied on developers and the province to build most of its important infrastructure. That was good while it lasted: For 30 years, the city carried no debt whatsoever. It was only recently that it began to take on debt to help maintain its assets, if not to build new ones. But even by 2024, according to the current projection, Mississauga’s debt service costs will amount to no more than five per cent of its revenues.

By that time, Torontonians will likely be contributing three times as much for capital works — at least 15 per cent of revenues. But nobody is suggesting that Toronto, with its own yawning infrastructure gap, is over-leveraged. Ontario legislation permits cities to spend as much as 25 per cent of their revenues on debentures to finance improvements for the benefit of future generations.

Mississauga plans to spend one-fifth of that — all the while gaining a $1.6-billion rail line courtesy of a truly indebted province.

In short, it’s ridiculous for Mississauga to pretend it can’t afford an LRT on its own main street. It’s a service that would be considered essential in any grown-up city. With more than 25,000 people a day already riding the city’s main bus route, the case for an upgrade to LRT makes itself. And with interest rates hovering close to zero, there couldn’t be a better time to get going.

What’s the point of treasuring a Triple-A credit rating if you refuse to use it precisely when it could do the most good? The allegedly “prudent” approach in this case is in fact tragically short-sighted.

One of the qualities that made Hazel McCallion a great mayor is that she always kept her eyes cast forward. She embraced the urban future with no nostalgia for the tidy suburb she had done so much to build. She championed rapid transit because she knew Mississauga was growing up, and she harboured no illusions that Big Sister would pay for it all.

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But without Hazel on the dais, it seems, Mississauga politicians can’t see beyond the bars of the playpen they occupied so happily during her long tenure.

John Barber is a freelance journalist.

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