The Dundas corridor and the Dixie flood works

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No candidate is on record on this issue yet. Every candidate in this race is searched the same way. Only candidates who have said something in public on this issue are named here, with a link to the source; the others are counted by race below. The full record for every candidate is on Candidates.

The full story

The record behind the questions, with a source at each claim.

Parts of Ward 3’s Dundas Street East corridor are designated flood-hazard land — and which parts turns out to decide a great deal, so the word is load-bearing. Flooding here comes from Little Etobicoke Creek, which spills near the Dixie Road bridge in high flows.

The City is fixing it. The Dixie-Dundas Flood Mitigation project’s proposed solution, now in detailed design, includes widening and deepening the creek, replacing bridges, relocating utilities and improving trails. It is fully funded: $24.2 million federally through the Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund in 2025, $24.4 million provincially through the Municipal Housing Infrastructure Program, plus the City’s own budget.

The timing is the issue. Detailed design runs through fall 2026. Key utility relocations are already under way, with completion estimated for late 2026. Contractor pre-qualification runs into early 2027. Construction: early 2027 to late 2028.

The two applications sit differently, and it matters which

The corridor carries designated hazard land, but the two live applications are not both in it. We queried the City’s own Natural Hazards mapping through its open-data service, testing the parcels rather than the addresses:

A control point placed inside a known hazard polygon returned a hit, so the “no” is a measurement rather than a failed query.

It may bear on something a reader would otherwise find strange. The staff report recommending 1225 Dundas East for approval never mentions flooding — no floodplain, no Special Policy Area, no conservation authority among the commenting agencies. The report gives no reason for that silence. The parcel lying outside the mapped hazard land does not settle it. The applicant’s Floodplain Mitigation Report — a memo from Stantec Consulting dated 7 August 2024, filed with the August 2024 resubmission — says “the Site is located within the current regulatory floodplain associated with Little Etobicoke Creek”, with Regional-storm flood depths on the City’s existing-conditions mapping ranging “from ~1m of flood depth at the northeast corner to ~0.10-0.30 m at the southwest corner”. It says the site is not in a Special Policy Area, and concludes the development “should not be restricted to proceed based on flood related concerns”, relying on proposed floor elevations it expects to be at or above the Regional flood level and on the City’s creek works.

Two limits on that check, because they bound what it proves. The layer is the 2010 Official Plan mapping and Mississauga Official Plan 2051 has been in effect since 2026-03-24, so a boundary could have moved since. And natural-hazard land is not the same instrument as a Special Policy Area; the City’s open-data catalogue carried no SPA layer when we searched its 328 datasets on 2026-10-02, so whether a Special Policy Area applies here is not tested by this check.

So the flood question on this corridor is live on both applications — on 1995 Dundas East through the City’s hazard mapping, and on 1225 Dundas East through the applicant’s own floodplain report.

The applications

Two carry Ward 3 file numbers:

• 1225 Dundas Street East (OZ/OPA 22-20 W3) — two 16-storey apartment buildings on a six-storey podium with ground-floor commercial, plus 34 four-storey back-to-back townhouses, per the statutory public meeting notice and the staff report — 587 units in total, all purpose-built rental. The City’s application page still summarises it as one 18-storey building with 612 apartments, which is a superseded scheme; see below. Not in designated hazard land — the nearest is about 9 metres away. Staff recommended approval, at 16 storeys where the Official Plan permits 3 to 12, and on 2026-09-08 Planning and Development Committee recommended the same to Council — see below.
• 1995 Dundas Street East (OZ/OPA 25-5 W3 and 21T-M 25-1 W3, a draft plan of subdivision) — two towers of 24 and 25 storeys plus 15 townhouses, submitted February 2025, under review. The City’s page has not been updated since September 2025. ⚠️ This is the one that IS in hazard land — its parcel intersects a designated natural-hazard polygon on the City’s own mapping. It is also the one not yet scheduled for a decision, so the flood question this page asks has time to be answered on it.

A close version of our question was asked in the room, in April

Added 2026-09-05. A close version of the question this page puts to candidates — what protects people in the meantime — was put to City staff on 27 April 2026 by a citizen member of the City’s own Stormwater Advisory Committee, and the exchange is in the minutes.

Mike Gaudet, a citizen member, spoke to how residents south of Little Etobicoke Creek could face increased flood risk during the construction period, and inquired about interim flood protection measures. The recorded answer, from the Manager of Stormwater Assets & Programming, was that “appropriate construction phasing and safeguards would be considered.”

That is a real answer and it is not yet a commitment, which is exactly the gap a candidate can be asked to close. The construction period runs early 2027 to late 2028 — years, not weeks — and the risk being described is the risk of the fix, not of the problem.

The same committee is watching this project. Its 17 February 2026 meeting took an update on Dixie-Dundas and pressed on the level of flooding the works are designed to protect against, when residents can expect completion, and student safety at St. Edmund School given potential flooding through the school yard — which produced a formal letter to the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board asking for the school’s evacuation plan. On 8 June the committee directed staff to bring a high-level update on the project and on how the City communicates stormwater resilience work publicly.

So the timing question below is not one nobody has raised. It has been raised inside the City’s own advisory structure, at more than one meeting, including by its citizen members — and it is still open.

So the sequence on the table is: decide the buildings first, build the flood protection second. That may well be manageable. One flood report is on file across the two applications — a Floodplain Mitigation Report filed for 1225 Dundas East in August 2024 — and the 1995 Dundas East file, the one whose parcel is in hazard land, lists none among its February 2025 documents. The open question is whether what such reports recommend becomes a binding condition of approval, and whether anyone has decided on the record what protection applies if an approval lands years before the creek is widened.

The committee recommended approval on September 8

Updated 2026-09-13. On Tuesday, September 8, 2026, Planning and Development Committee recommended that Council approve the applications, as set out in the staff report of 19 August 2026. Its report to Council, Report 10-2026, records this as recommendation PDC-0044-2026: two 16-storey apartment buildings on a six-storey podium with 553 units and ground-floor commercial uses, plus 34 back-to-back townhouses, with staff to return to Council with the implementing documents and by-laws. One oral submission was received.

Two things in that wording matter to a resident. First, the committee’s decision is a recommendation. Council approved the applications on Wednesday, September 16, 2026, taking up Report 10-2026 as item 11.1 on its agenda. The City’s summary of that meeting, published September 23, 2026, says: “Plans have also been approved for 1225 Dundas Street East, including two 16-storey apartment buildings containing 553 units and 34 back-to-back townhomes.” It gives no vote, and none is stated here. The official plan amendment and zoning by-law that actually change what can be built came back to Council after that, and (updated 2026-10-13) Council passed both on Tuesday, September 29, 2026: Official Plan Amendment 18 (By-law 0163-2026), which changes the site’s designation from Mixed Use to Residential High-Rise and permits a maximum height of 16 storeys, and Zoning By-law 0164-2026. The City’s notice of passing, dated October 8, 2026, gives 4:30 p.m. on October 28, 2026 as the last day to appeal to the Ontario Land Tribunal; if no appeal is received by then, the City’s decision is final. The zoning by-law does not come into force until the amendment does. Only the applicant, the Minister, or an owner of affected land, a specified person or a public body who made written or oral submissions to Council before its decision may appeal. Second, the rezoning approval would have been void “unless a zoning by-law is passed within 18 months of the Council decision”; the September 29 by-law meets that condition.

The committee acted on the notice’s description of the building — two 16-storey towers — not the superseded 18-storey scheme still summarised on the City’s application page. Report 10-2026 does not record how members voted. The committee’s minutes of 2026-09-08, read 2026-10-02, do: the recommendation was moved by Councillor C. Fonseca and carried 11 to 0.

⚠️ The meeting date moved once. An earlier version of this page gave Monday, August 24 — that meeting did not happen.

The City rescheduled it on August 13, and its revised notice said so at the top of its first page: PUBLIC MEETING RESCHEDULED. REVISED DATE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2026 (Previously Monday, August 24, 2026). If you had set aside August 24 to attend or speak, we are sorry for the wasted trip.

Staff recommended approval — at 16 storeys, where the plan permits 3 to 12

Added 2026-09-05. The report was obtained by a person opening it in a browser, because the City’s agenda system refused every automated request we made that day.

The report is dated 19 August 2026, from Andrew Whittemore, Commissioner of Planning and Building, prepared by Jaspreet Sidhu, Development Planner. It recommends that the applications be approved, and that staff return to Council with the implementing by-laws.

The proposal is 587 units — 553 apartments in the two towers, plus 34 townhouses — and all of it is purpose-built rental. (This site published “1,043 units” for weeks with no source behind it; that figure was removed on 2026-09-05 and this is the figure in the City’s own report.) The report is not fully consistent with itself: its unit-mix table totals 518 apartments, and one passage counts 35 townhouses; 553 and 34 are the figures in its recommendation, and 587 its stated total.

And this is the finding. Schedule 8 of Mississauga Official Plan 2051 sets a permitted height range of 3 to 12 storeys for this site. The proposal is 16, and the report says so plainly:

While the proposed development exceeds the height currently contemplated for the subject lands, staff are satisfied that the proposed height is appropriate, having regard for the site’s location within the MTSA, its frontage on Dundas Street, and the planned evolution of the Dundas Street Corridor.

The height set for this site has changed with each planning instrument since 2012, and the committee has now recommended more than any of them:

That is the mechanism question this ward actually raises: not whether 16 storeys is too tall — that is a matter of opinion — but what a published height range is for, if a recommendation can exceed it and recommend approval on the same page that records the excess.

And there is a second set of heights that does not reach this application either. Added 2026-09-05. The staff report places the site “within the Dixie Major Transit Station Area (MTSA)”, and weighs its shadow impacts against “the City’s intensification objectives within a Protected Major Transit Station Area”. In July 2026 Council passed By-law 0132-2026, which sets minimum and maximum heights and densities on certain lands in the city’s protected major transit station areas, including lands along the Dundas bus rapid transit corridor. That by-law is the subject of the Clarkson issue, because in a protected station area the Planning Act removes the appeal of height and density policies.

The staff report never mentions By-law 0132-2026 once. It amends By-law 0225-2007 — the 2007 zoning by-law — and proposes an exception zone under it. That is dated 19 August 2026, three weeks after 0132-2026 was passed.

The by-law’s transition clause does not explain it. The clause sits inside the by-law’s hatched “PMTSA Special Area”, and it covers a complete site plan or draft plan of subdivision application, or a building permit application, received before 29 July 2026, which may be approved if it complies with By-law 0225-2007 “as it read immediately before” that date. This is an official plan amendment and rezoning application, which is none of those. What we can say is narrower: a rezoning is itself an amendment to By-law 0225-2007 — By-law 0132-2026 amends the same by-law — and this one creates its own exception zone for the site. Whether 0132-2026 changed this site’s zoning at all we could not tell: the staff report still describes the property as “currently zoned C3 (General Commercial)”, and the by-law’s schedules are maps we could not resolve to a single parcel. (Corrected 2026-10-02. This paragraph previously said the clause “continues applications filed before 29 July 2026 under the 2007 by-law”.)

The practical effect is the point worth carrying to a candidate: the heights Council set for transit station areas in July 2026 do not govern this application, which the committee has recommended at 16 storeys against an Official Plan range of 3 to 12. A resident who read that Council had set new standards around transit stations would reasonably assume otherwise.

Two other things in the report are not the City’s decision at all. Affordable units are not required through inclusionary zoning, because “Inclusionary Zoning requirements are currently paused in the City of Mississauga in accordance with Provincial regulation.” And there are no minimum parking requirements, because provincial rules remove them inside a major transit station area. Both are provincial constraints on a municipal decision, which is what this site exists to make visible.

The recorded public engagement was small. A community meeting held by the ward councillor in July 2022 drew “approximately five people attending virtually”, and at the statutory public meeting in January 2023 “Two people were in attendance and provided comments.” The same report also records that at that January 30, 2023 meeting “Four oral submissions were also received.”

What we could not reach, and why it is stated rather than hidden

Checked 2026-09-05. The staff report is not published on the City’s application page — its five document groups run to the public notices and four submission sets, and carry no corporate report of any kind. The report lives on the committee agenda instead.

And on 2026-09-05 we could not read the agenda system at all. escribemeetings.com returned HTTP 403 to three separate tools across three layers — the portal root, a meeting page, and a document URL this project had previously downloaded successfully. That is a change from its recorded state and is logged as one.

So the report above was read by a person, not by us. A human opened the agenda in a browser and copied the text back; it is archived in full, with a note recording how it was obtained. We mention it because this site’s claim is traceability, and “how did you get this” is part of that: the document is a City public record either way, but the route to it that day was manual.

The file has been resubmitted three times, and the City’s own page describes the wrong building

Added 2026-09-05. The application page carries five document groups: the public notices, the original July 2022 submission (22 files), and three resubmissions — August 2024 (57 files), July 2025 (81 files) and May 2026 (53 files).

And the staff report accounts for the height. During review “the building heights were reduced from the interim proposal of 18 storeys to 16 storeys.” So the application page’s 18-storey summary describes a superseded scheme, and the statutory notice describes the current one. The report gives a figure only for the height change — it says density and commercial space also changed between submissions, but does not mention the summary’s 612 units, 626 m² of retail or 30 townhouses — so which earlier submission that summary line was written from is not established. The City’s own report records the change; the City’s own web page was never updated to match it, and still had not been on 2026-09-05.

(We inferred this before we could read the report — the July 2025 drawing set includes a sheet titled “Floors 14-18” while the May 2026 set runs Floor 1 to Floor 16 and stops. The report then confirmed it. Keeping the inference on the record because it was right, and because it shows what a file list can tell you when the document itself is out of reach.)

The notice and the application page describe different buildings

Both documents are the City’s, and they do not match.

The contradiction survived an update. We first recorded this on August 11, when the page was marked Updated: August 10. The City revised the page on August 13 to carry the rescheduled meeting date — and left the building description untouched. Re-read 2026-08-24: it still says one 18-storey building with 612 apartments. So this is not a page nobody has looked at; it is a page that was edited, that day, without the summary being corrected.

We had published the second version. Two statutory notices carry the first and agree with each other, so this page now leads with that — the notice is the document that tells residents what they are coming to speak about.

The committee’s recommendation settles which one it acted on: PDC-0044-2026 describes the notice’s two 16-storey buildings, not the application page’s single 18-storey one.

This is not an accusation of concealment — a summary line nobody updated is much more likely than a decision. But a resident relying on the City’s own application page was reading about a building that was no longer proposed.

Correction, 2026-07-30. This entry previously described “three towers of 29–41 storeys” and roughly 3,027 units near “Applewood Creek hazard lands”, citing City file OZ/OPA 22-32 W1. Those facts belong to Ward 1, not Ward 3: OZ/OPA 22-32 W1 is 1250 South Service Road, the Dixie Outlet Mall lands (four buildings, 4–19 storeys, 997 units), and the 3,027-unit figure belongs to 1580–1650 Dundas Street East (OZ/OPA 22-22 W1). The entry has been rebuilt on the City’s own Ward 3 application records.