George Babula and his high school football buddies have a plan for Toronto, and are ready to put it into action.

The seven men have known each other since the 1970s when they attended Parkdale Collegiate Institute. They regularly get together at their favorite pizza parlor in Parkdale and those gatherings often lead to talks about politics.

Now this group, which calls itself the Parkdale Party, are putting that talk into action.

Babula has registered to run for mayor of Toronto in this October’s municipal election with his friends backing him.

“They are my team, just like high school,” Babula said.

The seven men are scattered between Hamilton and Markham now. Babula lives in Swansea, just west of Parkdale, which is one of the reasons he was chosen to stand as the group’s mayoral candidate.

Babula, who owns a small telecommunications company, said by embracing bold and unconventional thinking, he and his team of Parkdale natives have a plan to change the City of Toronto.

The men have developed an extensive platform, which deals with everything from transparency and public service wages to union negotiations and smiling.

“It would be nice to implement some of our ideas, which we think would cause changes in this city virtually overnight,” Babula said. “Our goal is with transparency and efficient management of the city, (so) we can regain the trust of the taxpayer.”

Their plan starts with transparency, which leads to efficiency.

“Once you have an efficiently transparent operation, then you have trust, within the organization and from the taxpayers,” said Mississauga resident Walter Widla, the team’s campaign manager. “Right now the city has none of those.”

“The ideas we have are reasonably radical and the only way to get those ideas front and centre is to go right for the top,” Widla said. “Really, the idea is to speak for the more common individuals, the people who don’t usually participate in the political system, basically people like ourselves.”

The men said they have been working hard to pull their campaign together and have set out a budget of $11,000, most of which they plan to spend at their local hangout and in cab fare home. They have no intention of spending a million dollars on signs and advertising, because they said they don’t believe they need to.

“The bottom line is if you have a good idea, then it will sell itself,” Widla said. “If our ideas have merit, then we will get the publicity we need and if they don’t have merit, well then we had a nice time over the summer.”

Visit http://parkdaleparty.com for more on the Parkdale Party and its platform.

– Erin Hatfield

Posted in Mayoral race, News