Toronto’s Youngest Mayoral Candidate Thinks It’s Time for Old White Men to Step Aside
Meet Morgan Baskin. She wants to be mayor of Canada’s largest city. And she’s 19 years old.
by Amy Schellenbaum and Jeff Landale
In 2012, thanks to a very public crack cocaine scandal, mayor Rob Ford made Toronto politics into something of an international laughingstock. Today, citizens of Canada’s largest city will finally replace the most famous mayor they’ve ever had. They probably can’t do worse. Nineteen-year-old candidate Morgan Baskin hopes they will do much, much better.
Baskin, one of about 60 people vying for the mayoral slot, has only recently graduated from Inglenook Community High School. She wears red lipstick and, when not on her way to a campaign event, crop tops. She’s active on Tumblr. She’s prone to talking about “authenticity” and how she was politically active even “as a kid.” Other candidates, and a lot of the electorate, might argue that she still is a kid. But Baskin thinks 19 is old enough to make a change, and she’s sick of waiting for electoral politics to reflect her point of view.
To Baskin, being a teenager is not a strength or a weakness—it’s just a reality that has necessarily shaped her thinking, political and otherwise. Her age is a huge part of her identity, and she embraces it in her campaign: ”In many ways I have chosen not to let go of the things about being 19, and, you know, myself.” But she’s not only talking to people her age – she wants to rally anyone who doesn’t feel represented by the usual politician. “Change has to start before we’ve turned into 40-year-old white men,” she says.
Politics, for Baskin, means something more direct—and, perhaps, less mealy-mouthed—than it means for her more politically weathered elders. At a recent community event, Baskin and a group of other mayoral candidates were asked what she characterized as “the race question.” Others gave diplomatic overtures about colorblindness, but Baskin was not impressed.
“That’s stupid,” she recalls saying. “We’ve been ‘colorblind’ for 20 years, but when white dudes make the list of criteria, we end up with another older, well-to-do white dude.” Baskin is not interested in perpetuating the older, well-to-do white dude regime.
Baskin is loudest about perennial youth issues: she has a lot to say about access to affordable higher education—a concern that, frustratingly, seems to be shared only by those actively submerged under the choppy waters of student debt and post-collegiate joblessness. “We gave Millennials a road map, but after university there’s nothing, there’s a drop off a cliff,” she says. “You’re lucky if you catch something on the fall.”
Being young has a lot of political import. “It has to do with skin in the game,” she says. “My whole future is ahead of me.” Her position is that young people have inherently more to gain or lose from the urban material smelted by mayors and forged by their policies. Government decisions are necessarily going to affect youth the most—they’re the ones who’ll live with them the longest. “I can’t just think of the next four years, because there’s no possibility that I’ll be retired with a pension in four years, or dead in four years, or living my happily-ever-after. In four years I’ll still be working on becoming an adult.”
But to isolate her as a youth candidate would mean ignoring important questions about her candidacy: is Morgan Baskin, with her pile of pro-environment and pro-digital talking points ignited by Millennial pluck and disseminated through reblogs and retweets, the herald of a new type of politician? Is she an idealistic but unserious teenager, or a bellwether for millennial politicians of the future?
It’s easy to lump Baskin in with the activists who have railed about education and the environment for generations, but doing so would gloss over the gulf that exists between post-recession Millennials—who may be the first generation in a long time to have it worse than their parents—and their progressive elders. Baskin comes of age in a generation hardened by foreclosed opportunities, and, like anybody else in her generation, she has dealt with the failures of well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual policies of her youth activist predecessors. And her identity as a Millennial comes with a whole new set of ideologies—a lifelong awareness of climate change, the absence of free market rhetoric, and a growing acknowledgment of systemic racism.
One of Baskin’s major platforms is environmentalism, an issue that has been embraced both by youth historically (we’ve got a long time to live on this planet, after all) and Millennials right now. As Baskin puts it, Millennials have “always known climate change. … It’s our future and if something doesn’t happen, well, we’re stuck with a planet that’s falling apart.” And perhaps that tinge of desperation, the need for change right now, is what best defines her as a politician for her generation.
But is she a good sign of what’s to come to electoral politics? And is she different enough?
At the end of the day, the Millennial urgency and awareness that buoys Baskin’s campaign does not translate into specific or far-reaching policies. She acknowledges the necessity for dramatic changes—efforts to save the environment, openly confront systemic racism, and rescue an up-and-coming generation weighed down by debt and inadequate opportunities—but when it comes to specific actions, she follows the well-trod path of those who came before.
On environmentalism she says: “In municipalities you can start with the little stuff, starting with water and electricity conservation and talking about how much plastic we’re using, and stuff like that. It can’t all come at once.” When it comes to diversity, she sticks to “opportunity” rhetoric: “Part of it is about changing that discussion about opportunity. Because that’s where a lot of the problems start.”
She admits she’s “really about taking the things people have already told us and running with them.”
Baskin is also encouraged by how little opposition her platform has encountered (“I honestly cannot think of an instance where someone was attacking my platform as opposed to attacking me”). But this may be less a sign of the universal appeal of her policies than a failure to effectively confront the vested interests profiting from carbon fuels, indebted students, high housing prices, and marginalized immigrants. The fact that her environmental platform probably wouldn’t raise the ire of big oil companies suggests that it would also be ineffective in halting the worst effects of climate change. She urges action right now without offering up any, well, actions.
So, yes, her policies are leaky. But perhaps it doesn’t matter. From the looks of it, Baskin is using her candidacy as a platform for youth activism, rather than using youth activism as a platform for her candidacy.
“The values and the things that are important to young people have, for years and years and years, not been translated into policy,” she says. “If all the issues being talked about in elections don’t directly affect your life, why would you show up and vote?” Baskin hopes that by energizing youth involvement in electoral politics, Millennial concerns and values will be incorporated into government policies sooner rather than later.
“I get a fair number of Tumblr messages from young people, saying ‘I didn’t think it was possible’ and ‘It had never occurred to me to run for office, I thought I had to have a whole career first, I was looking at it 20 or 30 years in the future.’ Or ‘I had never paid attention to politics but you made me interested in politics.’” Maybe Baskin’s candidacy won’t change the world, or Toronto, but it could help spark the candidacy that will.
For now, it’s unclear if the upcoming Millennial politicians will turn the idealism and energy of youth into radical policy changes. But, again, that’s hardly the point of her campaign.
“It’s not so much about me but about someone taking that first step,” she says. “To see yourself in something.” It helps to see a candidate who looks like you.
