BATTLEGROUND: MISSISSAUGA CENTRE
In a diverse riding such as Mississauga Centre, two themes dominate conversations on the campaign trail: jobs and taxes.
AARON VINCENT ELKAIM FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL
A new riding on Toronto’s doorstep is a microcosm of modern Canada, and a key bellwether: suburban, diverse, and inclined to back political winners. John Ibbitson reports on what it will take to succeed here – and what that tells us about an election that is up for grabs
Photography for The Globe and Mail by
Aaron Vincent Elkaim
Because Joab, 4, and Zeervia, 2, managed to get more of their dinner on them than in them, their father, Elvis Malcolm, cleans up as he explains why he plans to vote for Stephen Harper.
Other party leaders “say a lot, but don’t deliver,” Mr. Malcolm, a personal-fitness trainer, tells a reporter who is interrupting the family’s evening meal. He values the child-care benefit that arrives each month courtesy of the Harper government. He believes the Conservatives have managed the economy well.
“They’ve moved the country forward.”
Just a few doors down the street, Judy MacDonald is finally getting home after her 90-minute rush-hour commute from downtown Toronto, where she works as a dental assistant. Mr. Harper will never, ever have her vote, especially now that the Conservatives have introduced an income-splitting tax benefit.
“I’m a single mother, so I don’t have anyone to split the income with,” Ms. McDonald explains. She is still trying to make up her mind whether to vote for the New Democratic Party’s Thomas Mulcair or Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau.
Mr. Malcolm and Ms. MacDonald may not agree on much, but with Canada’s 42nd federal election campaign well under way, the two have one thing in common: They live in a riding like no other, one that is a microcosm of modern Canada, located in a region with a tradition of backing whichever party forms the government.
Families gather on a summer evening for an outdoor film screening in Mississauga’s Celebration Square. The suburban belts outside of Toronto and Vancouver are historically
where federal elections are won and lost.
AARON VINCENT ELKAIM FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL
It has been three weeks since Mr. Harper – soon after Mr. Malcolm and millions of parents like him had received back payments for increased child benefits (a $3-billion handout that critics called blatant vote-buying) – asked Governor-General David Johnston to dissolve Parliament and call an election for Oct. 19.
At 78 days, the campaign will be the longest in 143 years, likely the costliest ever and, for the first time in this country’s history, a three-way race for power that is too close to call.
Mr. Harper is bidding to become the first party leader since Wilfrid Laurier to win four consecutive mandates. Thomas Mulcair is hoping to be the first New Democrat ever to lead the nation. And Justin Trudeau wants to restore the Liberal Party to its historic place at the top of the greasy political pole; that would require a herculean feat (the Liberals flirted with extinction after the last election), but the polls suggest that any of the three leaders could succeed.
This election falls in the midst of uncertain times. In July, Canadians learned that, with oil prices still down, the economy had shrunk for the fifth month in a row and may already be in recession. The military is battling radical insurgent Islamists in the Middle East amid a heated debate over how much power security forces should be given to detect and prevent attacks on the home front. Pressure is becoming so great to have Ottawa seriously tackle the challenge of climate change that the Conservatives find themselves on the defensive as environmental laggards.
Joe Barillari gives Dan Ahumada a trim at his barber shop, which was built more than 65 years ago and is one of the oldest in Mississauga.
AARON VINCENT ELKAIM FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Just three months ago, Mr. Harper’s home province cast aside almost a half-century of Progressive Conservative rule to embrace, astonishingly, the NDP. Across the country, incumbents have been ousted in four of the last six provincial elections, and a conservative party hasn’t won since doing so in Saskatchewan in November, 2011, six months after Mr. Harper’s last victory.
As a result, the prospect of federal change is now in the air with the polls so close – the latest weekly tracking poll from Nanos Research puts the three major parties in a virtual tie – that the contest has been heated since the moment it was called. All three are battling to defend the ridings they have, and to seize any they can from their rivals.
If there is one riding equipped to foreshadow how close the outcome of this perplexing election may be, it is Mississauga Centre. Although its name may be familiar – the old Mississauga Centre disappeared in a redistribution more than a decade ago – it is new for this election, made of turf poached from four of its neighbours.
And it is a bellwether at birth.
New seats, in swing territory
Of course, every riding counts in an election. But in Canada, different regions have a tendency to cancel each other out.
Quebec is volatile, but for the past quarter-century has supported whichever party forms the opposition (first the Bloc Québécois, then the NDP). The Liberals are traditionally strong in Atlantic Canada and in most city centres across the country, where they battle the NDP for dominance. The Conservatives own the Prairies and rural Southern Ontario.
But Canada is no longer either urban or rural: It is a suburban nation. According to a 2014 study headed by David Gordon, director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Queen’s University, two-thirds of all Canadians live in suburbs.
The two regions where large numbers of ridings swing from one party to another – deciding elections in the process – are both suburban: the belts wrapped around Vancouver and Toronto. Of the two, the latter – known collectively as the 905, for its area code – is more important only because it has almost twice as many seats (22 or so, depending on how you count) as the former.
How significant is the 905? In almost every election since 1968, the majority of the ridings from Oshawa in the east, north to the shore of Lake Simcoe and west to Burlington have gone to the party that formed the government.
In a rare exception, most of the 905 stayed Liberal in 2006, when Mr. Harper first came to power with a weak minority government. Five years later, when he finally secured a majority, almost every riding in the 905 went Tory blue. The progress of Conservative power is told in the party’s increasing success in Greater Toronto.
Mississauga Centre was part of a sea of Tory blue in the 2011 election, compared to a smattering of seats that went to the Liberals (shown in red) and the NDP (in orange).
Now there is an opportunity for even more 905 blue – the result of a historic expansion of the House of Commons. For decades, suburban populations were underrepresented in the Commons. Constitutional guarantees and ancient bias in favour of preserving the country’s rural roots meant that places like Prince Edward Island were allocated four seats, while single ridings in places such as greater Toronto or Vancouver had almost as many voters as the entire Island.
To remedy the injustice, the Harper government introduced legislation that will grow the House by 30 seats in this election. Ontario gets 15 new seats, nine of them in the 905, including the new Mississauga Centre.
But Mississauga Centre is special, even if at first glance it seems anything but. With a population of just over 118,000 (still almost as many voters as in all of PEI), it is the heart of a community that, perhaps more than any other, exemplifies modern Canada.
Old suburb, new suburb
Mississauga’s civic motto begins “Pride in our past.” The city is named for the indigenous people who once lived along the Credit River. No longer able to resist the tide of European settlement, the Mississaugas moved to a new home (provided by the Six Nations Confederacy) near Brantford. In the early 1800s, the land they left behind became the Township of Toronto, not that long before a city with the same name was incorporated a few miles to the east.
For a century the township was largely farmland punctuated by such quiet villages as Erindale, Malton, Clarkson, Port Credit and Streetsville. After the Second World War, however, the farms began to disappear, and then the villages, replaced by what downtowners sniffily call suburban sprawl. With the influx of commuters, several communities combined in 1968 to create the Town of Mississauga, which expanded into a city six years later. By 1976 it had a population of 250,000, consisting mostly of vast tracts of bungalows, strip malls and supermarkets, with wide streets to accommodate all the commuters’ cars.
Now, four decades later, that older developed area anchors the southern portion of the city, but the population has tripled to 750,000: multicultural, double-income, mobile, wired, suburban and middle-class. And the heart of the community lies a bit to the north, in Mississauga Centre.
1. Masjid al-Farooq Mosque
2. Sheridan College Hazel McCallion Campus
3. Square One shopping centre
4. Absolute Condos (‘Marilyn Monroes’)
5. Mississauga Civic Centre
6. Mississauga Central Library
7. Living Arts Centre
8. Credit Woodlands
9. University of Toronto Mississauga Campus
The riding begins just east of Square One, one of the country’s biggest shopping malls; runs west to the Credit River, the last bastion of the Mississaugas; and is divided in half horizontally by the perpetually humming Highway 403. And it contains the downtown that Mississauga has long been said to lack: a complex jump-started by the local government near Square One that includes a civic centre (with a postmodern city hall, municipal art gallery and wedding chapel), as well as a central library and a performing-arts centre, all ringed by built-yesterday condominiums dominated by two beautiful, curvaceous glass towers nicknamed “the Marilyn Monroes.”
Nearby is the Hazel McCallion campus of Sheridan College, named after the iconic mayor who retired last fall after 36 years in office. North and west of the new downtown, the homes are generally newer, larger and more substantial than those to the south: brick houses with oversized garages, and new semis.
A family crosses Dundas Street at Hurontario Street.
AARON VINCENT ELKAIM FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL
A lost ‘sense of tightness’
Who actually lives in these homes? As it turns out, we have a very good idea. By combining census data, other publicly available information databases and social-values surveys, even building permits and satellite images, market-research firm Environics Analytics has sliced up the Canadian population by postal code into no fewer than 68 categories, from “cosmopolitan elite” and “country acres” to “aging in suburbia.” (You can find their assessment of your postal code at www.environicsanalytics.ca/prizm5.)
Environics also assesses how these people feel, and found that Mississauga Centrans embrace such values as concern for the environment and enthusiasm for new technology, as well as empathy, tolerance and racial diversity. The last of those makes sense, since, like the rest of the 905, the riding has a very large immigrant population. Sixty-one per cent of Mississauga Centre’s residents were born outside Canada, and what Statscan calls “visible minority” residents make up a slightly larger portion – 67 per cent – of the population. They are part of the 21 per cent of Canadians, almost seven million souls, who were born elsewhere.
The roughly 250,000 immigrants a year that Canada has been bringing in for more than two decades – the equivalent, over that period, of two Torontos – are almost all from developing countries, and, like most Canadians, they gravitate to the suburbs.
But their attitudes are anything but uniform, observes Rupen Seoni, a vice-president at Environics Analytics. “There is diversity there – but there is diversity within diversity.”
Environics says Mississauga Centre is dominated by eight of the 68 groups, most of them composed of middle-class immigrants, though with plenty of variation from lower- to upper-middle class, depending on the neighbourhood. There are new arrivals, who are well-educated but have modest incomes and are just starting to climb up the social ladder; “sophisticated singles” and upscale couples; and established families, again often affluent, whether newcomers or native-born.
About a quarter of the riding’s population is South Asian (principally from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), about 12 per cent of the population is of Chinese descent, and about 7 per cent Filipino. Another 7 per cent are from Arabic countries.
The fact that Mississauga is such a true melting pot continually amazes even Gurpreet Malhotra, executive director of India Rainbow Community Services of Peel, which offers settlement and other services to the immigrant community. “I can never get past how a Korean bakery will be next door to a Jamaican grocery store beside a Pakistani jeweller, and on and on and on it goes, from all sorts of backgrounds,” he says. “I’ve not seen a mix like this even in Toronto or Vancouver.”
Gurpreet Malhotra, executive director of India Rainbow Community Services, points out some of his favourite local stores.
AARON VINCENT ELKAIM FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL
For more than four decades, from behind his barber’s chair, Joe Barillari has watched Mississauga evolve: the booming new arrivals from Toronto, the kids growing up and moving out, the parents moving on. For the past 17 years, his shop has been in Credit Woodlands, a neighbourhood near the river in the southwest part of the riding. Now, at 65, he should retire, but says he’d miss the company.
“When people get their hair cut, they talk,” he says. They talk sports, they talk lottery dreams, they talk about what’s going on back in the old country. They talked during the recession about the hell everything seemed to be going to in a handbasket.
Abdullah Al Hamlawi has noticed the city changing as well. Although just 18, he feels nostalgia for a time when Mississauga was “more of a family thing,” the nursing student explains during a shopping trip to Square One. “It’s lost that sense of tightness.”
