Liberals hope Crombie’s name can flip Mississauga seats. It may be an uphill battle

MISSISSAUGA, Ont. — Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie jogs up to a door on a recent Saturday morning canvass in Mississauga, where she is warmly greeted in Polish by a woman who expresses her support and wishes the politician good luck.

Crombie heads off to the next door in the Mississauga East-Cooksville riding, certain she can count on Zenobia Maziarz’s vote.

But Maziarz later confides that she is still undecided.

She likes Crombie’s promises on health care, but also likes Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford’s messages against “catch and release” bail policies.

“I’ve been here for 20 years and we’re never concerned about safety, and now it’s the issue,” Maziarz said, talking about break ins and auto thefts. “We don’t feel safe any more.”

The way Maziarz is wrestling with her vote is in many ways representative of the six Mississauga ridings, which tend to swing back and forth between blue and red.

That push and pull may come into particular play in an election where the Liberals hope the record and name recognition of the city’s former mayor helps them flip some seats, but polls have the Tories cruising to another victory – and Mississauga tends to vote with the party that forms government.

Some observers say even Crombie’s own seat isn’t a guarantee. She won the Liberal leadership in December 2023 but has not sought a seat in the legislature until now.

Those races, in particular Mississauga East-Cooksville, could be tight, said Randy Besco, a political science professor at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. But they don’t need to be won by huge margins.

“The Liberals may not win any seats in Mississauga,” he said. “So, if (Crombie) gets another few points out of the fact that she’s a well-known politician, that may make a real difference.”

That is certainly one of the deciding factors for Vivian Nimer, another Mississauga East-Cooksville voter. At 77, health care is her major policy concern, she says, but she also liked Crombie’s record as mayor for nine years and the fact she was endorsed by beloved longtime former mayor Hazel McCallion.

“She’s been good to us in Mississauga,” Nimer said. “She followed our ways with Hazel McCallion and it was very good during Hazel McCallion and it was good with her, so now I’m sure that goes on with what she’s going to do now.”

Mississauga East-Cooksville is an older, more established riding, Crombie says, and with a large population of retirees there she says voters are receptive to her health-care focused campaign, including a promise to attach everyone to a family doctor.

“For me, (it’s) not only the health-care message on providing doctors, but seniors messaging, education messaging,” Crombie said. “I always have to have that lens of, ‘Is it going to help our seniors?'”

The Progressive Conservatives believe they can hold off the Liberal challenge in Mississauga and re-take all of the city’s six seats, including Mississauga East-Cooksville. The support behind Crombie as three-term mayor may not translate into support as a provincial representative, said Chris Loreto, who works as a strategist and serves on the PC party’s executive.

“Certainly she’s a formidable political personality in Mississauga, but the provincial dynamics are very different than the local dynamic,” he said.

And if the Liberals concentrate their efforts on the ground in Mississauga East-Cooksville to ensure Crombie wins a seat, it may take away from the ability to secure those other five Mississauga seats, he said.

The Progressive Conservative looking to prevent Crombie from getting into the legislature is none other than Silvia Gualtieri, the mother in law of former PC party leader and Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown.

The selection of Gualtieri as the candidate is interesting for political nerds, Loreto said, but “not necessarily important” as she is a strong candidate in her own right. The party did not make her available for an interview.

There was no love lost between Crombie and Brown as mayors with competing interests during an on-again, off-again dissolution of Peel Region by the Ford government. Both said they believed their taxpayers had funded growth or infrastructure in the other municipality and vehemently disagreed on financial numbers.

Over in Brampton, which makes up most of the rest of Peel Region, the Liberals were always going to face an uphill battle in this election. The NDP has held seats there more recently than the Liberals, and the contentious Peel divorce may also be a factor, said Gurratan Singh, who held a Brampton seat for the NDP for four years and now works as a vice-president at Crestview Strategy.

“(Crombie) has this history of kind of being seen as pitting Mississauga against the rest of the region,” he said. “Because of that, I think in Brampton, her own brand particularly will have a tough sell.”

As for that brand, Crombie sees it as one of public service – which she calls her “niche” – recalling when she first entered municipal politics as a councillor in Mississauga, where more residents were born outside Canada than in the country and half count a language other than English as their mother tongue.

“I really loved it, really loved it, and became good at it, and people would invite me to their cultural events, and I just loved attending, celebrating with them and it gave me such joy,” she said in a recent interview.

“We celebrated our differences. … That’s what Mississauga was always about.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 16, 2025.

Allison Jones, The Canadian Press