In my first blog I said that real leaders solve real problems and use valuable resources wisely. In my second blog I talked about setting Tipping Point goals. In this blog I would like to share an example of an extraordinary Canadian leader who has done both of these things superbly and that leader is Mayor Hazel McCallion. Mayor McCallion is Mississauga Ontario’s first and so far only mayor. She was first elected Mayor in 1979 and at the time of this writing, this remarkable woman is 89 years old and finishes her current term as mayor in November 2010.

Because 80% of Canadians now live in cities, cities are one of our main “economic engines that generate wealth and stimulate creativity. They are centres of opportunity that attract people and business from across the nation and around the world.” Mayor McCallion has taken this advice to heart. When she was first elected as mayor, Mississauga was a bedroom community. Based on her vision and her execution of that vision, today 80,000 to 90,000 people commute to Mississauga to work. As of July, 2008, 40 of Canada’s top 500 companies and 59 of Fortune 500 corporations have offices in Mississauga.

            I asked Mayor McCallion how she developed a cluster of economic engines in Mississauga:

H.M.   We began with a single bio company in the 1960’s and today Mississauga has the third largest bio cluster in Canada. One of the reasons for this is that we have a large and well-educated workforce. Mississauga is surrounded by some of the finest, post-secondary institutions in the world. More specifically, The University of Toronto at Mississauga offers one of the few Masters in Biotechnology programs in Canada. Mississauga is also part of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), and hence, part of one of North America’s largest centres of biomedical activity. The GTA is home to more than 300 biomedical companies, world class teaching hospitals and research facilities.

We also champion initiatives to support innovation and scientific breakthrough such as information technology, which is an important infrastructure for the biotechnology industry. The Mississauga Information and Communication Technologies Cluster consist of 3,912 technology-based companies with more than 37,000 employees.

We also have one of the world’s busiest and most modern airports and we are currently going through a visioning process where we want to plan for the future. We need to take a million cars off the road in the Greater Toronto Area. One way we can do that is by building a fixed link [high speed rapid transit] from the Pearson International Airport to downtown Toronto and Mississauga. We are also working on integrating all of the transportation networks in the GTA.

We need expert leaders in each and every sector of our economy and this includes Master Leaders from municipal governments. In my next blog we will look at Master Leadership Model I developed from The Seven Strategies of Master Leaders.