The election of former Mississauga councillor and Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish as the city’s new mayor in June has been hailed by local leaders as a shift for the area.
Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown, Caledon Mayor Annette Groves and Parrish herself are proclaiming a new era of advocacy for the Region of Peel, promising they’ll get new funding commitments from other levels of government.
The self-styled “Three Musketeers of the modern day,” as Parrish described them in a recent social media post, are also showing their strength in another way: by relying heavily on the strong mayor powers granted to them by the Ford government.
All three have taken control of hiring and firing at city hall — a relatively rare move for mayors of big cities province-wide — while Groves was warned by Housing Minister Paul Calandra after she attempted to rezone land on the route of Highway 413 using strong mayor powers.
As the Peel Region leaders take full advantage of their enhanced powers, internal documents obtained by Global News show Queen’s Park is watching and monitoring how all strong mayor powers are used — without any obvious plans to step in and referee them.
Strong mayor powers were initially introduced by Ontario Premier Doug Ford in 2022, giving the mayors of Toronto and Ottawa the ability to override and sidestep their councils on certain issues, particularly if they related to provincial priorities like construction of new housing.
Those powers were then expanded step by step to other cities and towns across the province. Some mayors said they would refuse to use them, others said they would consider them sparingly.
One expert fears the use of strong mayor powers to hire and fire staff — as all three Peel mayors have done — risks politicizing the roles of municipal civil servants.
“The senior positions and appointments inside the civil service at the municipal level, they are critical to the day-to-day operation of local government,” Myer Siemiatycki, professor emeritus of politics at the Toronto Metropolitan University, told Global News.
“You’re basically turning the entire apparatus and staff of the city into people who are beholden only to one person and know that if they want to keep their job, they better be singing from the same hymn book as the mayor.”
Caledon mayor goes first
Groves in Caledon was the first to use the hiring and firing powers of the Peel Region mayors.
At the beginning of August 2023 — just 32 days after being granted strong mayor powers — Groves fired Caledon’s top civil servant and replaced her with a new chief administrative officer (CAO) recruited from the Town of Erin.
She then relinquished control of many of the town’s hiring and firing powers, handing them to the CAO she had selected and hired using a mayoral order.
Caledon Coun. Dave Sheen, who obtained a copy of the new CAO Nathan Hyde’s contract through freedom of information laws, told Global News that the new CAO “began to clean house” almost immediately, moves he said he believed were made on behalf of the mayor.
Sheen said the town clerk was let go, followed by the town solicitor. The chief planner went next and then the commissioner of finance. The communications manager was also let go, along with the commissioner of engineering, public works and transportation.
The director of bylaw left, along with the head of human resources.
Through a spokesperson, Groves denied the characterization that Hyde was acting on her behalf when he made a myriad of changes to staffing in Caledon.
“The CAO was brought in to oversee all administrative functions, including the evaluation of the current mode of operations and structure,” Groves said. “He restructured to strategically pivot the Town to address intense organizational growth needs tied to Bill 23 targets and Peel transition, while ensuring strong service delivery in resident-facing programs.”
That restructuring, Groves said, saw the town move from 11 departments with directors to six led by commissioners. As a result, she said, some roles were phased out.
Caledon would not disclose how much it had spent on severance in 2023.
“The chilling effect on staff has been hard to watch,” Coun. Sheen said.
“Keep in mind, Caledon is relatively small compared to our neighbours to the south, Brampton and Mississauga. All these staff represented a significant amount of corporate and institutional knowledge, community history, know-how, and background. All of this was lost when they left.”
Within the contract Hyde signed were several clauses that Sheen said concerned him.
The contract specified that instead of reporting to the whole of council, the CAO would be accountable only to the mayor. It also said if Hyde was fired without cause, the town would owe him three years of full-time pay. Finally, his contract outlined a 35-hour work week, with the CAO allowed to charge 1.5 times his hourly rate for any extra hours worked.
The contract shows Hyde is to be paid a salary of $270,000 — or $148.35 per hour.
“I recognize that the strong mayor’s legislation gives the mayor the power to hire and fire the CAO,” Sheen said. “However, I argue that those powers do not change the fundamentals of the Municipal Act which expects the CAO to be accountable to all of Council, not just the mayor. I don’t believe the mayor has the authority in the legislation to contract with the CAO this way.”
Groves said she believed the law allowed her to make the decisions she had.
“Strong mayor powers permit the hiring of the CAO,” Groves said. “The legislation does not restrict the compensation package or contract offered.”
Brown gives himself veto powers
At the beginning of 2024, Brampton Mayor Brown used his strong mayor powers to hire a new director of bylaw enforcement in the city.
The mayor appointed a former Peel police officer to head up the division.
“He believes using the strong mayor powers for hiring purposes will be extremely rare as evidenced by only using the power once in its first year,” a spokesperson for Brown’s office told Global News.
“To ensure City Hall is effectively resourced to deliver on Council’s plans and priorities we are making sure that every new hire has been budgeted for as part of the broader annual budget process.”
A couple of months later in March, a new process was brought in at Brampton city hall that allowed the mayor to decide whether or not he wanted to exercise his strong mayor powers to block the appointment of anyone to a senior role within the city.
An internal note sent to city staff outlined how Brown would tighten his grip on the recruitment process by using strong mayor powers to either veto or approve the appointment of every director in the city.
“A new process will be introduced to better support Mayoral oversight of employment matters,” Brampton’s CAO wrote in the note, obtained by Global News.
“The changes will… enable the Mayor to either waive the use of Strong Mayor powers and/or make an organization decision prior to all hires for the heads of any division.”
The development of a veto policy allowing the mayor to block any appointment he sees fit — rather than proactively recruiting someone to the role — worried one former councillor.
“When you’ve got an opportunity to be in total control of every division and every group within the city, that can only lead to increased presence of corruption, possibilities,” former Brampton Coun. Jeff Bowman told Global News.
Bowman has long opposed Brown as mayor and held a press conference at Queen’s Park once begging Ford not to grant Brampton’s leader strong mayor powers.
“Is there a criteria that’s going to be used to say yes or no to these individuals? If there is, I’d love to see it,” Bowman continued.
“Proactively saying, ‘I think this would be a good person, he’s done this in this city and I think he’ll do a good job here’ is one thing. Looking at a couple of names and saying, ‘No, I don’t like him, oh no don’t, like him.’ I mean, is he a member of a different political party? Has he been part of a municipality that a mayor didn’t like? I mean, let’s see some criteria.”
Parrish issues volley of orders
Within hours of being sworn in as Mississauga’s seventh mayor, Parrish began using her strong mayor powers to restructure how senior staffing would work under her administration.
CAO Shari Lichterman was fired, with the commissioner of transportation and works promoted to her role. City solicitor Andra Maxwell resigned her position and Parrish used another strong mayor order to appoint her replacement.
The new mayor also reversed a decision by her predecessor to delegate hiring and firing authorities, opting to give herself the ability to control the recruitment and management of the city manager, the four commissioners and Mississauga’s top lawyer.
In total, Parrish made five staffing-related strong mayor decisions in her first five days as mayor.
Before the election, Parrish told Global News she was “looking forward” to using the powers to push through housing-related decisions.
“I love this strong mayor stuff,” she said in January, later adding her preference was to find agreement instead of using the powers.
“If you get a tie, then you go ahead and use the strong mayor powers,” she said. “But you debate it first, you vote first. It’s not one of those things (where) you just march in there and order people around. It’s not my style anyway; I try to coerce people, get people to cooperate, that’s how I usually get things done. I talk to people, I work with them.”
In a statement sent to Global News in July, Parrish said it would be “inappropriate” to comment on the volley of staffing changes she made using strong mayor powers after her appointment.
She said, however, that she was taking the housing crisis “very seriously” and cited examples of decisions while she was on council where she felt Mississauga had made decisions that would slow or block approvals and resulting in defeats at the Ontario Land Tribunal.
“Should those situations arise during my term, I fully intend to use all tools at my disposal,” Parrish said.
Queen’s Park is watching
As the three Peel Region mayors have flexed their enhanced powers to shape municipal staffing in Brampton, Caledon and Mississauga, officials with the provincial government have watched on.
Documents obtained by Global News through freedom of information laws show that the government has tracked the use of strong mayor powers by municipalities across Ontario, with links to news articles, mayoral orders and comments.
Initially, the government tracked them in a large spreadsheet before moving that process to a cloud-based sharepoint.
Despite tracking how the powers are being used and keeping a log of when Ontario’s mayors issue decrees, the Ford government has stayed out of major decisions and said it doesn’t plan to get involved.
“Implementation of the strong mayor framework is a local matter,” a spokesperson for the province said.
“It is up to the mayor, council and municipality to implement the framework in accordance with the legislation and associated regulations.”
A briefing deck on the strong mayor powers also obtained by Global News shows the province is leaving it up to local councils to decide if strong mayor powers are being misused. The existing watchdogs of Ontario’s ombudsman and local integrity commissioners are the only recourse for frustrated councillors.
“It is up to the respective municipalities to determine whether these examples of uses of powers or performance of duties are in accordance with the strong mayor legislative and regulatory framework,” one briefing slide said.
Professor Siemitrycki said issues could arise if oversight sits within city hall, where the mayor increasingly reigns supreme.
“Who’s going to adjudicate those kinds of complaints? And when you say it’s going to be someone internal at city hall who’s going to do that?” he said.
“The whole framework here is that the mayor’s got the power to determine who gets senior positions inside city hall and who may be fired from those positions. I don’t think it creates a level playing field when a member of council might complain that the mayor has overstepped.”
While the government maintains it is for local councils and independent watchdogs to decide what is and what is not an appropriate use of strong mayor powers, it has intervened on at least one occasion.
In April, Minister Calandra wrote to Groves, who had planned to rezone 12 parcels of land using strong mayor powers. Six of the 12 parcels were along the route of a proposed new highway and would, as a result, “be inconsistent and not conform with provincial and regional policy directions.”
Calandra warned Groves that — while he “appreciated” efforts to build more housing — it could not be done along the route of the proposed highway. His letter warned the mayor her order must be “modified to remove any permissions on lands” along the route of the highway.