Random Access

Suppose you are an incumbent Mississauga city councillor who is interested in running for the job as Chair of Peel Region that will be up for grabs at the inaugural regional council meeting in December.
Here’s your dilemma: Do you do the right thing and announce your intentions during this current run for office or do you sit back and wait in the weeds until after the election? That’s when years of Hatfield and McCoy squabbling between Mississauga and Brampton-Caledon is likely to finally result in a shootout over the position of regional chair.
It’s a rhetorical question because politicians are creatures of self-preservation and doing the right thing in this case would mean handing an election issue to your opponents. No politician in his, or her, right mind would admit to the possibility of getting elected to City Hall Nov. 13, then turning around and running for the job as regional chair on Dec. 7. Even if the admission is the right thing to do — which it is.
Yet you can bet the thought has flickered across more than a few political radar screens around the horseshoe at City Hall.
Emil Kolb is running again for Peel Chair but relations between Mississauga and the rest of Peel have become so bad that there is a definite possibility that Mississauga might want to put up its own candidate.
That is problematic for several reasons. The veteran politicians who know the ropes are, generally speaking, already sitting around Peel’s council table.
Finding candidates from off council who would actually have any chance of winning the one vote from Caledon and Brampton that would be necessary to win won’t be easy. There are only a handful of truly credible candidates, which is why the same old names, like Steve Mahoney’s, keep surfacing.
This is one situation where being a politician who is out of a job could actually be an advantage.
That’s how Emil Kolb ended up with the job in the first place, if you’ll recall. The good people of Caledon ushered him out of the mayor’s chair and he was available to run for the better job as chair of the Region a few weeks later.
Should one of our city’s incumbent councillor lose, there’s always the nice consolation prize of being Mississauga’s nominee for chair.
If a sitting councillor ran and won, the cost of a by-election to replace them would be $150-$200,000.
Any city councillor who wants to run for Peel Chair with a clear conscience should declare for the job now. We’re not going to believe them when they pretend that they were talked into it by their colleagues after the municipal election.