Scanned, recopied or Internet copy, if there are errors, please e-mail me with corrections:
Opening comments: More at the end.
Follow-up to first article and how the developer were again getting their way - "Mississauga has rapidly regained its old reputation as a haven for fast-buck developers".
To read more from City Magazine, an urban planning news paper, at Mississauga Centre Library - Canadian room, 3rd floor.
This article has its own spelling etc., errors.
To the 1975 Mississauga Judicial Inquiry - Municipal Investigation web-page.
To the main Judicial Inquiry page - to the Hazel McCallion page.
City Magazine V-2 N-2 - June 1976 - By Desmond Morton.
Mississauga:
The inquiry that won't go away
Only a year ago, Mississauga's notorious judicial inquiry into unspecified municipal corruption appeared to be about as dead as politicians, policemen, lawyers and local voters could make it.
After only three days of public hearings before Judge Rae Stortini early in September, 1975, the Mississauga inquiry was officially derailed when a ruling by the Ontario Supreme Court questioned its terms of reference. The challenge, sponsored by ex-mayor Charles M. "Chic" Murray and backed by briefs from Ontario government officials, argued that the inquiry mandate was too vague and that the new City of Mississauga had no right to inquire into alleged misdoings under the previous municipal corporation.
The court decision coincided with strong hints from local police officers, notably Chief Douglas Burrows of the Region of Peel force, that detailed investigations had already disposed of allegations of crime. With a little help from old-guard politicians like Peel regional chairman Lou Parsons and from pro-developer weeklies like the Mississauga News, local taxpayers apparently concluded that their dollars had been used to finance a costly, vindictive fishing expedition for the benefit of their new mayor, Dr. Martin L. Dobkin.
That impression, helped on by a venomous, well-financed campaign for veteran councillor Ron Searle, led to Dobkin's upset defeat in December, 1976.
With Ron Searle as the new mayor, backed by a loyal pro-growth majority on the new council, Mississauga has rapidly regained its old reputation as a haven for fast-buck developers. Road-widenings and "hard" services are back at the top of council priority lists; library spending has dropped to its old priority. The beautiful tree-lined Mississauga Road, spared a few years ago after fervent citizen protest, is again threatened with piecemeal destruction. Only a rump of reform-minded councillors has prevented Searle and his allies from slipping back to the chummy, closed-meeting style which prevailed before 1974.
Unfortunately for Mayor Searle's peace of mind, the one vestige of the Dobkin regime he cannot exorcise is the Inquiry. Like marsh gas escaping from Mississauga's proud new garbage dump, whiffs of the suppressed investigation continue to break the surface.
One reason is the continuing $900,000 suit launched by ex-mayor Murray against the five alleged instigators of the inquiry: Dr. Dobkin, Councillor Hazel McCallion, Toronto lawyer Joseph Pomerant, former inquiry council Noel Bates and Mississauga builder Jan Davies. Murray's statement of claim, alleging a "conspiracy" by the five was curtly dismissed with costs by Mr. Justice W.D. Griffiths of the Ontario Supreme Court. The charge, claimed Griffiths, "read more like a press release" than a legal motion. However, the case is not necessarily dead, if Murray's lawyers can keep their client in the game, a trial will still be a couple of years away.
More important than the Murray suit in keeping the inquiry alive is the pile of seven boxes of files now sealed and secluded in a Mississauga bank vault. Packed up when the inquiry was prematurely wound up, transferred to the Ontario Attorney General's office and finally back to Mississauga, the papers presumably contain the best kept secret of the whole affair: the nine specific claims of municipal corruption which Dr. Dobkin wanted investigated.
While neither the province nor the city have shown the slightest interest in opening the files, Judge Stortini, Noel Bdtes and the inquiry's former executive director, Ross Wilson, all insist that they, contain plenty worth investigating.
While Judge Stortini's claims have brought indignant protests from Mayor Searle, they have also drawn a trickle of journalists to Mississauga's unfamiliar turf. Most have retreated in frustration. A team from the CBC's Fifth Estate tried its best in early 1977. Harold Greer, a knowledgeable veteran from the Queen's Park press gallery, did some digging in the autumn. A Toronto Star duo, Brian Vallee and Paul King, managed to unearth at least a couple of the original inquiry allegations.
The most interesting suggested a version of influence peddling which could well have embarrassed Provincial Treasurer, Darcy McKeough. According to the Star story, Jan Davies (whose charges against James Murray, son of the former Mayor, had sparked the inquiry) approached Arthur Armstrong, ex-president of Bramalea Consolidated Developments, for help in getting an early hearing from the Ontario Municipal Board on a development project of his. According to Davies, his lawyers had warned him that he faced a four to five month delay from the O.M.B. - and even longer if he appeared "as a witness in the Mississauga inquiry.
According to both Armstrong and McKeough, the pair met in the minister's office on May 8th, 1975. Armstrong got the speed-up Davies wanted and took the opportunity to volunteer for service in that year's Tory election campaign.
More embarrassing than McKeough's willingness to lean on an allegedly independent tribunal or Armstrong's subsequent appointment as "chairman of arts and culture" in the Conservative campaign, was a bill for $25,000 which Jan Davies received from his powerful go-between. Armstrong, who had lost his job with Bramalea as part of what the present management calls "a general house-cleaning operation" and who now lives in Arizona, now claims that he sent the bill in anger at Davies' ingratitude. Certainly it was never paid.
Armstrong's contention that he did nothing wrong may be valid. Certainly the Attorney General's department, under Roy McMurtry, showed no desire to prosecute him. "In any country in the world", Armstrong told the Star, "that sort of thing is acceptable and accepted. I'm not talking about corruption. I'm talking about the old-boy network."
However, it is probably fortunate for the provincial Conservatives that the inquiry sessions in Mississauga were aborted before the 1975 election campaign had reached its climax. The minister's lengthy rebuttal, which was prepared but never used during his campaign, might not have saved him from voters who that year were feeling, distinctly uncharitable about Tory "old-boy net-works".
Two and a half years later, the mystery of the Mississauga inquiry has hardly faded. While most of those involved, from ex-Mayor Murray to current Mayor Searle insist that they want to get to the bottom of the claims and insinuations, chances of a revival of the Stortini inquiry are remote. Links between the present Mississauga City Hall majority and the pre-1974 regime are close while the ties with the Peel county Tory machine are tighter still. Whether or not the inquiry documents would ever produce criminal prosecutions, they would tell more about the developer-politician relationship than many powerful people want known.
The best testimony comes from one man who has been through the papers and the accompanying investigation. "Criminally, there was no evidence for charges," claims OPP inspector Lou Pelissero, the officer invited by the Stortini inquiry to lead its investigations. "But ethically and morally," he was quoted by the Toronto Star, "it looks like hell."
Mississauga's new mayor is likely to continue to support efforts to ensure that local citizens never get a chance to look at the inquiry documents from Inspector Pelissero's perspective.
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