Random Access

Masood Khan is getting a little restless.
He’s been waiting to be officially anointed as the Progressive Conservative candidate in the riding of Mississauga-Brampton South since January, but it still hasn’t happened.
“I started last year,” he says. “We had a search committee and I signed 404 members, but they kept telling me it was too early in January to be nominated,” Khan said this afternoon.
Now it’s June and he’s still waiting. Khan has asked leader John Tory and party officials about his status, most recently at the convention two weekends ago in Toronto, and they have assured him he has nothing to be concerned about.
Still, it is June and Khan has heard that two other potential candidates have submitted letters of interest for the nomination to headquarters.
Khan is one of those people who has been around Mississauga politics forever, it seems, but has never really broken through into it per se.
He laughs when asked how he should be described. He’s the publisher of the Eastern News (a newspaper published in Urdu), he’s a local real estate broker, the long-time president of the River Run Ratepayers’ Association and an actor, producer and director of films for the South Asian market.
He’s served on City Hall committees and run for councillor several times (’91 ’97, 2000.) He ran for mayor in ‘03, when he got into a well-remembered spat with the mayor over his comments questioning her age and the fact that City Hall reflects a “white-coloured Mississauga” and not the “beautiful Mississauga with lots of colours, and lots of visible minorities” that is now a reality.
One thing Khan does not particularly want to be described as is the second cousin of Mississauga-Streetsville MP Wajid Khan, even though it is perfectly true.
“I think that is going to go against me,” he says, because of the controversy surrounding Khan’s decision to cross the floor in January to join the Stephen Harper Conservatives. Interestingly, Masood was a Liberal once upon a time as well.
Frankly, you can see why Tory and the Tories, might not be rushing to embrace a guy who has been decidedly underwhelming in his previous efforts at the municipal polls.
This is a seat that should be attracting a lot more interest from would-be Tory MPPs if the party really hopes to win power at Queen’s Park.
For one thing, it is the only Mississauga seat where there won’t be a Liberal incumbent. It appears that the Liberals, who are considering an appointment, will have a politically inexperienced female candidate as their standard-bearer.
The ever-confident Khan says that no matter who the Liberal candidate is, from what he knows of the potential runners, “they will be no competition” for him.
Unfortunately, for Khan, this isn’t one of his movies and he can’t just cast himself in the role of winner.
The federal riding is held by Navdeep Bains, who has made it look like very hospitable territory for the Grits in winning the riding twice since the new boundary was created.
With no high-profile candidates in the mix provincially, Mississauga South-Brampton should be one of the more interesting races to watch in the City, and a truer barometer of the success of the provincial campaigns than the others. That’s because the ‘local candidate’ effect there looks like it will be almost negligible.