Mississauga: The Center of the World
The City That Isn’t
I have lived in Mississauga Ontario Canada (just west of Toronto Canada) for a year and a half. It is a city of winding highways that connect little islands of concrete and lonely condo buildings. No one walks in Mississauga. There are suburbs that stretch and sprawl that the best geo-guesser would not be able to place. The mecca that the city encircles is Square One a grotesquely large shopping mall. This is all artifice however, cheap plywood and paper mache hiding a deeper stage. Underneath it all is a secret older city a Mississauga before the sprawl, the Mississauga of the Anishinaabe.
I have not entered the secret city but I came close to and is the reason why great figures from all over the world end up in what appears to be such a non-place.
The Secret City
The secret to entering the hidden city is simple you must first weigh heavy on the scales of history and then you must give up your name. While this may seem silly there is many such cases of people doing so and passing through to the other side, the most notable attempt being Colonel Sanders.
Who decides these rules and what is the secret city? Before the City of Mississauga was erected, the Mississauga of the Credit, a sub-nation of the Anishinaabe-speaking Ojibwe lived on the land. While at first sight this may have come and went this is what the secret city is; they haven’t left and it is still their land.
The secret city came into being on February 28, 1820, when the Mississaugas signed Treaties 22 and 23, surrendering nearly all of their lands along the Credit River. Only a 200-acre parcel east of the river remained under their control. To preserve a connection to the land, the elders bifurcated the land along the Credit River, folding one side over the other. This hidden fold became known as the secret city an invisible parallel to modern-day Mississauga. It runs alongside the visible world, with only one hidden gate allowing entry.
To formally pass through a ritual must occur. The person once their name has been given up must have an Anishinaabe Elder or medicine person on the other side seek a new name through prayer, fasting or dream. Tobacco is offered; the name-giver announces the name to the Four Directions and a feast follows. A spirit name links the person to Creation, is carried in prayers and is considered part of their protection and healing. Once this link is sturdy they may pass through and be free.
While some may doubt the validity of all this if you have ever lived in Mississauga it is self-evident. While the magic trick of a city folded on top of another was performed adeptly once you know what to look for the sleight of hand becomes obvious.
Igor
Before we get to the Colonel we must be disciplined and start at the beginning with Igor Gouzenko. Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko (Игорь Сергеевич Гузенко) was born in 1919 in a working class family in the USSR. His older brother died of malnutrion at the age of 1. When the Red Army created huge new intelligence units after Germany’s 1941 invasion, he was selected for the GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate) and trained as a cipher clerk an unglamorous but critical back-room job encrypting and decrypting high-level cables.
By 1942, the USSR was allied with the West against Nazi Germany, but deep political distrust remained. Stalin exploited the wartime focus to authorize Soviet intelligence (NKVD/GRU) to steal atomic and military secrets from the Allies. Canada, with its lax security, close ties to the U.S. and U.K., and key research sites like the Montreal Laboratory, became a prime target. The RCMP’s small, overstretched Intelligence Branch lacked the resources to properly vet the growing wartime public service.
Gouzenko was sent abroad to infiltrate Canada with his wife Svetlana their new son. For just over two years he worked night shifts in a locked cipher room, turning Moscow’s plain-text messages into five-digit code groups and back again, and passing them to Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, the station chief.
In 1945 Gouzenko was recalled back to the USSR. Aware that returnees often disappeared into labor camps, he feared for his Canadian-born child and pregnant wife. Though the recall was routine, Gouzenko, deeply affected by Western freedoms and living standards, saw it as a death sentence.
After trying unsuccessfully to avoid returning, he defected smuggling 109 classified documents that exposed a Soviet spy ring operating in Canada, the U.S., and Britain. The documents revealed attempts to steal atomic research and linked agents to Soviet intelligence.
His defection triggered the 1946 Royal Commission on Espionage. Twenty-six Canadians were charged; fifteen were convicted, including MP Fred Rose. The “Gouzenko Affair” shocked the West and sparked the Cold War.
The dominoes were pushed for the United States and Soviet Union to keep the world on the edge of nuclear catastrophe, fighting proxy wars from Korea to Afghanistan that killed and displaced millions.
Igor after playing his pivotal part on the stage was cut loose from history and under the witness protection program shed his old name. From powers greater than him he was allowed to be placed in Mississauga. In doing so Igor was able to pass into the secret city and beginning his new life free of the USSR.
Igor was the first I could find to be allowed to pass through the gates. We do not know the name he was given on the others side beyond George Brown, the one given by the Canadian Government. This was only the beginning for those to attempt passage with some succeeding and most failing.
The Colonel’s Curse
By 1964, Harland Sanders had franchised more than 600 Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. He sold the U.S. business for US $2 million but kept sole rights to Canada and, in 1965, settled beside the QEW in Mississauga to run “Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken of Canada, Ltd.”
Yet the naming ritual that unlocks the secret city demands surrender of one’s legal identity and “Colonel Sanders” wasn’t a legal name at all, just an honorific Kentucky governor Lawrence Wetherby had bestowed in 1950.
The contract with the new U.S. owners legally required him to keep on portraying “the Colonel” as the chain’s paid brand ambassador. Bound to a persona he could never renounce, he spent his final 15 years orbiting the fold in the land, forever barred from stepping through it .
Drake’s Failed Bid
In 2024, fresh off his Kendrick-Lamar bruising, Drake supposedly angled for admission. He dropped a surprise album, $ome $exy $ong 4 U, its cover shot outside Mississauga’s curvy Absolute World towers. The single “Lasers” chants “say my name” like a code phrase for shedding an old identity. Fans read the project as a ritual offering, but the city stayed silent, and by winter Drake was back in Toronto proof that fame alone won’t buy passage.
Corporate Supplicants
While more abstract, scandal pushed a whole company to the gate. In 2012 Bangladeshi investigators accused executives at SNC-Lavalin’s CANDU Energy arm of bribery during reactor bids; parallel probes eventually tied the parent firm to illicit payments across Libya, triggering a 2019 Montreal court plea: one construction subsidiary admitted funnelling C$47 million in bribes and swallowed a C$280 million fine with three years’ probation.
Desperate to shed the tainted skin, the conglomerate rebranded as AtkinsRéalis in September 2023 and shifted its nuclear-engineering hub to Mississauga the very ground woven into Anishinaabe lore. It takes a considerable amount of corporate courage to sacrifice a name like this, whether its enough to pass through remains an unanswered and uneasy question..
My Own Try
While living in Mississauga I started this blog and did so with a pen name “Isaac T.B.” This is in a small way me giving up my own name which put me up against the gates of the secret city. Suddenly I could see the allure, why so many disparate people from across the world have come to Mississauga. I could hear the pounding of hoofstep, the freedom of an uncomplicated life attuned to nature how alien our world has become. I did not pass into the secret city but I wish I had.
I'm not the only one who feels this. Mississauga, has grown rapidly from farmland to city pulling in people from all around the world becoming the most diverse western city with over 200 languages spoken. People without knowing in want to be on the other side of the fold.