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Aurora Votes 2026: Meet Your Council Candidates – George Tremtsidis, Ward 5

October 19, 2026   ·   0 Comments

George Tremtsidis lives near Ada Johnson Park, an expansive greenspace in Aurora’s Ward 5.

As a community park, it’s supposed to be a destination, but it has untapped potential for the community’s northeast neighbourhoods.

That’s something Tremtsidis is hoping to change as he vies to be Aurora’s next Ward 5 Councillor.

“I live in the Ward, I understand the Ward, I’m a political junkie, and I decided to run as opposed to sitting on the sidelines,” says Tremtsidis, who said he had considered whether or not to throw his hat in the ring for six months before registration opened.

Helping bolster his decision to join the Ward 5 campaign was a drive to bring “accountability” to Council table.

“I’m in the logistics business, I’ve negotiated hundreds of millions of dollars [in] contracts and I hold myself and the people who work with me accountable. I expect the Mayor to hold our Operations, our Management people accountable,” he says, citing Aurora Town Square of one example where he says he sees a lack of financial accountability. “I understand finance very well. Understanding and crunching numbers, negotiations, I’ve trained in negotiations for over 30 years and I’m for people first. I can listen as well and talk. That’s why God gave us two ears and one mouth – you should listen twice as much as you talk. I don’t only listen, I hear what a person is trying to tell or ask me. We can agree to disagree, but we have to agree to talk.

“I think a lot of people here on Council don’t do that very well. If we’re making a decision such as [Aurora Town Square], I think it should have gone out as a referendum during our elections.”

On a Ward 5-specific front, Tremtsidis says he wants to advocate for improved snow plow service “so my grass doesn’t get torn up every year,” as just one example. He would also like to see increased community engagement in the Ward, perhaps starting with regular community events at Ada Johnson Park.

“I don’t think there’s a sense of community here,” he says, noting that centring so many community events on one location, such as Aurora Town Square and Aurora Town Park, doesn’t work for many residents who live elsewhere. “What’s so hard about having something in three or four different parks and rotating it? It’s bringing people into my community, in my ward, and having a better understanding of what’s happening with their time and with their taxes.”

Property taxes, he argues, should be lowered and services funded from these taxes streamlined for maximum efficiency, including Bylaw Operations, finding more cost-effective ways of maintaining outdoor skating rinks in local parks, including a return to the tried-and-true methods of flooding the ice pad areas, and enforcing vacant homes tax to bring more money into municipal coffers.

“We have so many vacant houses here, but we don’t enforce the vacant tax laws,” he says. “We have millions of dollars of back debt from property taxes that are vacant and nobody does anything about it. I think Aurora is a great town to live in, I think the majority of the people I’ve met, if not all of them, have been great people… but it’s getting expensive to live here.”

By Brock Weir
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

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