Since retiring as mayor in 2014, she has kept an exhausting schedule - rising at 5:30 a.m., supporting campaigns for local causes and making frequent stops at the exhibition, or as she calls it, “my museum,” to meet with community groups. McCallion insists that she always put the interests of residents first and denounces the multimillion dollar cost to taxpayers for a judicial inquiry “so that my political opponents could try to extract their pound of flesh from me.” “He attempted to do it and tried to convince others to support him.” “Unfortunately, my son, he had heard me talk so often that we needed a convention center in the city core,” she said. McCallion tends to talk in aphorisms and mantras: No decision is worse than a bad one, make every day count, negativity is bad for your health, have a purpose. Perhaps a product of so many decades spent in politics, Ms. “Some of the serious conversation and debate unfortunately happened behind closed doors in order to try to present this unified front,” Mr. She became known for stamping out expressions of dissent at City Hall, with the political horse trading occurring in private, which made for blandly accordant council meetings, said Mr. He looked after his business, and he let me look after the politics, so we worked extremely well together.”Īs Mississauga grew rapidly during her time as mayor, her tenure was not without its detractors. Her husband, Sam McCallion, died in 1997. She left the firm after more than two decades to help her husband manage his printing business, and she became more involved in the business community of Streetsville, Ontario, at the time an independent suburb of Toronto. The engineering firm relocated her to Toronto, which had no women’s league, so she stopped playing hockey for pay, but continued to skate, fast, until about three years ago.
#Hurricane hazel professional
In her 2014 memoir, “Hurricane Hazel: A Life With Purpose,” she wrote, “Considering the dental cost, I guess I broke even on my professional hockey career.” She had to get two bottom teeth replaced following a stick to the mouth in a particularly rough game. She played from 1940 to 1942 in a women’s league with three teams and was known for her speed on the ice.
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She later finished secretarial school, got a job managing an engineering firm’s office in Montreal - and started playing professional hockey for five dollars a game. She spent her high school years studying in Montreal and Quebec City, and credits her mother, a nurse, for instilling in her the confidence to take on the world. “When you have to leave home at 14 and you’re a Depression kid, you have to become completely independent,” she said. McCallion was born in a farmhouse and grew up during the Great Depression. “She was very, very pragmatic and that was part of her political recipe.”Īmong all the objects, she said the one she holds most dear is a clock from her hometown, Port Daniel, on the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec. “It’s not like she’s had consistent positions all these years,” said Tom Urbaniak, a professor of political science at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia and the author of a book about Mississauga’s sprawl during Ms. McCallion said, “and I did it.”Īs mayor, she was known for an uncompromising leadership style, a take-no-prisoners bluntness and a political independence that meant she never ran under the banner of any party. She had to be carried into some meetings by emergency responders. McCallion, who sprained her ankle rushing around to work on the evacuation. No one died, and one of the few people injured was Ms.
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The dramatic event was ordained the “Mississauga Miracle” because of the success of the emergency response after two-dozen rail cars transporting hazardous chemicals erupted in flames at an intersection in the city. Just months into her first term, she gained a national profile for managing a mass evacuation of close to 220,000 residents after a train derailment in 1979.