He grew up with a view of City Hall outside his house. Now, he will be Mississauga’s mayor.
Alvin Tedjo, a first-term councillor and former provincial political staffer, staged an unlikely campaign against two titans of Mississauga politics — former mayor Bonnie Crombie and incumbent Carolyn Parrish — to ride to victory on Monday.
Here are four things to know about Tedjo.
Growing up in the shadow of city hall
Tedjo’s Chinese-Indonesian parents settled in Mississauga when he was four and he grew up downtown, where he could see City Hall from outside his house.
“I saw a lot of the challenges and hardships that come with that immigrant experience,” he said on a 2025 podcast. “If you see something wrong, do something about it,” he said his parents taught him.
He was student council president in high school and served on the mayor’s youth advisory committee. He met then-mayor Hazel McCallion in the mid-1990s, when he won an award for being Young Citizen of the Year. “Get into politics, young man,” she told him, he said.
Before Tedjo held elected office, he ran in 2018 for the provincial legislature in Oakville North—Burlington, where he finished third. Then he threw his hat into the Ontario Liberal leadership race in 2019, ultimately finishing with 2.7 per cent of the vote.
At the time, he said he was campaigning for his kids — “and everyone else in this province who is worried about the future.”
“We’ve got an unprecedented amount of changes coming up in terms of our climate, in terms of our economy, in terms of our education system,” Tedjo told the Star at the time. “And there are real consequences that we can see every week that this government is completely unprepared for.”
Tedjo also ran for Mississauga mayor in 2024, finishing second behind Parrish.
From first-term councillor to unlikely mayor
Tedjo was an adviser and political staffer at the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities and spent four years working in government relations at Sheridan College. He later led strategy and communications at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Tedjo became a Mississauga councillor in 2022. Both Parrish and Crombie said Tedjo was an excellent councillor — but also that he didn’t have the experience needed to lead the city.
“I would say, just watch us,” he told the Star’s Alyshah Hasham during the campaign. “There’s so many great leaders out there who have taken on an office like this and ran with it.”
He noted that, at 43, he is 10 years older than New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
A ‘nerve-wracking’ campaign that snowballed to victory
Tedjo’s decision to leave his likely safe council seat to run for mayor was one that the then-candidate admitted was “really nerve-wracking.” In a Liaison poll completed in mid-August, Tedjo sat at nine per cent among all voters and 12 per cent among decided and leaning voters.
That was good for fourth place. Parrish and Crombie exceeded him by wide margins.
But his campaign snowballed in late September and early October. He earned the unprecedented endorsement of the Peel police union, then stayed on the side during a testy exchange between Parrish and Crombie in an Oct. 1 debate.
By the first week of October, Tedjo trailed Crombie and Parrish by only a handful of points among decided and leaning voters. And on Monday, he won.
