Alvin Tedjo was elected to lead Mississauga by voters who want change; he’s laid out his plan to deliver that for his dynamic city

“Today, the city of Mississauga has made a clear and historic choice to demand a change at City Hall!”

That was the declaration of Alvin Tedjo as he addressed supporters at his victory party Monday night, after winning Mississauga’s mayoral election, defeating two former mayors, incumbent Carolyn Parrish and her predecessor, Bonnie Crombie, to complete his underdog rise to the top of the city’s local government.

Tedjo represents the type of change—philisophically and demographically—that seems to be a perfect fit for his young, diverse, booming city that suddenly feels destined to shed its suburban past for a rapidly shaping urban future.

The rookie councillor, with just four years as an elected official, was successful in his second try two years after losing to Parrish in a 2024 byelection when Crombie had stepped down to lead the Ontario Liberals. 

The result marks a significant shift in Mississauga’s local leadership, with Tedjo vowing to bring fresh solutions to problems City Hall has struggled with for a decade. Housing affordability, bringing the municipal budget back under control, modernized approaches to neighbourhood policing and expanding an urbanized transit network are his top priorities.

According to the City of Mississauga’s unofficial election results, Tedjo received 74,479 votes, 38.9 per cent of all ballots cast. Parrish finished second with 51,853 votes, followed by Crombie with 43,191.

A total of 191,166 ballots were cast across the city, representing 33.9 percent of eligible voters, an approximately 13 percent increase from 2022 when about 21 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot.

Tedjo positioned himself as an alternative to the political divisions and old ideas that he said had come to define the mayoral contest. Residents repeatedly noted to The Pointer that they were tired of watching his two main rivals “fighting”. The common refrain from voters The Pointer spoke with Monday was that Tedjo represents change.

His victory party, hosted at a local restaurant, illustrated the type of energy that had been building behind Tedjo since September, as people packed the venue like sardines in a can, as they feverishly chanted, “Alvin! Alvin! Alvin! Alvin!” They kept it up long after his victory speech was over.

Residents who attended Alvin Tedjo’s election night victory party filled the venue with electricity. They exuded the type of energy that swept him into the mayor’s office as the change candidate in a city that seems ready to finally shed its suburban status. (Alexis Wright/The Pointer)

Speaking to reporters after his victory, Tedjo said voters had responded to a campaign focused on policy rather than pettiness.

“I think people were quite bothered by the personal attacks,” he said during his post-election media scrum. “I don't want to reflect too much on the past, but it certainly gave us an opportunity for people to see the positive plan that we had and the vision for the city that we had.”

The win followed a campaign Tedjo described as a difficult six-month effort, built around connecting with communities across Mississauga and listening to residents before developing his platform. In his victory speech, he acknowledged the responsibility that comes with the office, saying his campaign had put forward a comprehensive vision to deliver meaningful changes in residents’ lives.

“This is a tremendous responsibility that I do not take lightly,” he said.

Affordability emerged as one of the central issues of Tedjo’s campaign, as he argued that rising costs were making it increasingly difficult for residents to build a future in Mississauga, promising at the beginning of his campaign he would freeze property taxes for two years.

The Pointer has laid out criticism of the idea, questioning how the freeze will be paid for, and what Tedjo will do to avoid even worse tax increases when the bills come due in the future.

He told reporters Monday that his first 100 days in office is a crucial period to bring the city’s budget under control.

“Our first hundred days, it's creating the new budget here in the city of Mississauga to make sure that we're freezing property taxes and not adding any new costs onto residents,” he said.

During an interview on The Pointer’s Ballot Vox Podcast a week before the election, Tedjo expanded on his plan to introduce fiscal responsibility.

“We need to do a deep dive into every department, see where what's working, what's not. I'm not looking to just fire people, that's definitely not the goal here. But we have to be conscious of inflationary costs, or the excuse of inflationary costs being what is used often to sort of say, ‘we need to grow by eight percent.’ Do you? Because most companies, most organizations don't. 

“We should also be talking about bringing in an auditor general, doing value for money audits, and going department by department and figuring out what is working and what is not,” he told The Pointer. 

Housing was another major component of his platform. Tedjo proposed creating a Mississauga Housing Corporation to bring together public land owned by different levels of government, along with builders, corporations, environmental organizations, local community groups, realtors and advocates to develop affordable housing, family-sized units and housing for seniors, expanding on Parrish’s housing task force she implemented days after being elected in 2024.

“We need the entire spectrum of housing available,” he said during the podcast. “From emergency shelters to market housing and in between transitional housing, supportive housing. Every single time we try to build something that's not market housing, we get resistance, and even when we do try to build market housing, we also get resistance."

After he was elected as a rookie councillor in 2022, Tedjo and fellow Mississauga and Peel Region Councillor Joe Horneck expressed their frustration around the regional council table, where many affordable and supportive housing decisions are made. They repeatedly questioned the veteran councillors, some who have been in office for decades, about their unwillingness to find solutions to Peel's housing crisis. The pair brought forward innovative housing ideas, but were usually met with indifference or excuses from senior staff and their fellow councillors who either did not prioritize funding for housing or could not wrap their head around new ways of delivering what residents desperately need, after decades of failed policies.

“We're going to be going uphill regardless of what type of housing we're trying to build, so we might as well try to build the type of housing that helps the most people," Tedjo told The Pointer. "And one of the things I am proposing to introduce is creating a new organization within the city of Mississauga.

“It'll be called the Mississauga Housing Corporation. It'll do similar work to what CreateTO does in Toronto, where we use City land, we try to bring in regional land and any federal and provincial land…if they are willing to give it up, to build housing, which they say they are, and make the city the applicant, make the city the main proponent for that type of development.

"[We would] work with obviously the building sector, the private sector to help us build it, but then we get to control the kind of housing that it is, making sure that it's affordable. If we need supportive housing, or if we need seniors’ housing in that neighborhood, or if we need more transitional type housing, then we get to put that in.

“We get to decide if it's going to be family units. We could put in a new community centre, or a new senior centre, or whatever it is that we need in that particular neighborhood. It's about giving more control to the city, to the region, to be able to actually create the right type of housing in the right neighborhoods here in the city, whereas we've been taking a backseat. And when you're taking that backseat, and you're just waiting for developers, and you're trying to say, ‘okay, we'll give you incentives’, you're only going to get so far. The way the market's going right now, it's not looking good.

"So I think it's time that we stepped up as a city, and we led the way in terms of making sure that we're building that affordable, supportive, all those types of housing that we need to build here.”

During his first mayoral press conference Tuesday, October 27, Tedjo reiterated many of the same priorities and strategies.

“The challenge is that we are truly in a crisis and I said a crisis like this requires a wartime effort.”

Alvin Tedjo spoke with media and residents Tuesday, the day after winning Mississauga’s mayoral election. He vowed to take a fresh approach to the City’s budget and committed to hire an independent Auditor General. (Benjamin Steeves/The Pointer)

A week ago, when speaking with The Pointer, Tedjo outlined some potential community safety plans as a new member of the Peel Police Board.

“[W]ith public safety, it's been such an issue for people in the last couple of years. People are concerned with break-ins and car thefts. And we didn't want to just tackle that problem with funding the police. Funding the needs that the police have is a huge part of it, absolutely, making sure they're resourced and they have the technology. But there's so much more that we need to do to fight against the social determinants of crime, to prevent crime, to make sure that the right people are responding to the right calls. That means getting investments in mental health professionals and crisis workers and getting them to respond to certain calls to de-escalate, to make sure that the social service system is properly and adequately funded, to make sure that housing is, again, properly and adequately funded and available for people who need it. And find other solutions that cities have been able to implement that are working already.”

He offered examples such as special scanners just for car thefts that police can use, and intersection cameras that could be adapted to serve as crime monitoring devices, with strict rules to protect people’s privacy. He also mentioned using Faraday bags, which cut off all electronic signals, rendering cars unmovable, and could be given away to residents to prevent auto thefts.  

“Now, we know we don't control everything in the city, but in terms of the City of Mississauga not doing those things, that's made it easier for people to get away with stealing vehicles in Mississauga. So we need to level the playing field. Then we need to lobby the provincial and federal government for all the changes that we need to the system that continue to make it hard for our frontline officers to do their work.”

Tedjo is also proposing five new rapid-transit bus routes along Derry Road, Erin Mills Parkway, Dixie Road, Dundas West and Lakeshore Road, and advocating for all-day, two-way GO Train service on the Milton line to help improve traffic flow along the city’s most congested corridors. He said he hopes to ensure the Hurontario LRT will reach its completion date of 2028, after several prolonged delays.

During his Tuesday presser, he thanked Parrish and Crombie for their decades of public service and congratulated the incoming and returning councillors, saying he looked forward to working with them over the next four years.

Incumbents Stephen Dasko, Chris Fonseca, John Kovac, Natalie Hart, Joe Horneck, Matt Mahoney, Martin Reid, Sue McFadden, and Brad Butt were all re-elected in their wards. Joining them are Tom Ellard in Ward 2 (replacing Tedjo) and Lucas Alves in Ward 7, which was represented by mayoral candidate Dipika Damerla.

Ellard’s campaign largely focused on lowering taxes and improving neighbourhood safety.

Alves focused on a property tax freeze for two years and getting the Hurontario LRT completed without further delays.

Tedjo expressed confidence on Tuesday in his ability to work collaboratively with councillors, pointing to his previous experience inside the chamber.

“Brighter days are ahead, and together we will build the best city in Canada.” 

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