The Villager

Not so in the ongoing battle for a slice of the gargantuan federal surplus, in which this week the old - Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion - has snatched the smouldering log of the One Cent Now campaign from the young - Toronto's whipper-snapper mayor David Miller - and announced that she, not he, will be leading the charge for the foreseeable future.

It stings, watching the home team eclipsed so perfunctorily.

But it may well yield a better outcome for cities in this province and this country.

The fact of the matter is that while Miller has been very effective in rallying support among the country's mayors for the One Cent Now campaign, he's been a dismal failure at getting any sympathy from the Stephen Harper government.

Indeed, the only effect that the push to get a penny of the GST sent municipalities' way has been to make Finance Minister Jim Flaherty grin all the more broadly when he announced that he'd rather cut another cent off the tax as a part of the fall economic statement. Miller, the sometime-and-now-former New Democrat mayor from Toronto, is as close to a natural enemy for Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada as one might expect to find. Nothing is easier than denying a request - even a reasonable one - when it comes from the mouth of David Miller.

Saying no to Hazel McCallion, on the other hand, is a very different matter.

The Mayor of Mississauga has a monolithic reputation, in the vote-rich Golden Horseshoe and beyond, as a mayor who runs an efficient council that presides over an efficient municipality. When McCallion goes into the new year demanding her constituents pay a tax increase of as much as 8.9 per cent - an increase which she sprang on those constituents this week - you can bet that no one on that council's going to move a deferral until after the federal election or any other nonsense. That's because Mississauga politicians are properly terrified of their mayor.

The Prime Minister should be too - because McCallion is speaking directly to the people the Conservatives will need if they hope to form a majority, and she can't be dismissed in the same way that the Conservatives have so clearly dismissed Miller.

And Miller's being careful to play nice with McCallion too.

When asked whether McCallion's soon-to-be-unveiled campaign, Cities Now!, will interfere with the Toronto-led One Cent Now campaign, Miller maintained it was complementary - and he allowed that Mississauga's own financial difficulties might serve as a better example of how the current fiscal arrangement makes cities unviable.

"The thing about Mississauga is that it's an edge city, it's a suburb and it's recently built," he said. "If it can't meet the needs of its residents it makes the case in a very clear way. What I said to Mayor McCallion when we spoke was whatever you say, I'll be there with you."

That's a smart strategy. Of course, given the apparently soured relationship between the Toronto Mayor's Office and the Prime Minister's Office, it might be even smarter to "be there" very quietly, bow to age and experience - and let McCallion do the talking for awhile.