Zach Paikin was eight years old when he made what might be considered his first political speech. His father, broadcaster Steve Paikin, had taken him to a 1999 election campaign rally for Dalton McGuinty. From atop a picnic table, the Ontario Liberal Leader kept repeating a line – “we gotta get rid of Harris” – a reference to then Conservative premier Mike Harris. When young Paikin started to echo the refrain, the local riding candidate, Mike Colle, promptly grabbed the microphone and raced over to where the Paikins were seated.
“What did you say, kid?” Mr. Colle asked.
Young Zach took the cue.
“We gotta get rid of Harris! We gotta get rid of Harris!”
It was, Mr. Paikin says now, a defining moment. “From that point on, I knew I was a Liberal.”
Twelve years – and countless other rallies – later, the kid's passion for politics has not ebbed.
At the federal party's biennial conclave next week in Ottawa, Mr. Paikin is vying against four rivals to succeed Joan Bourassa as national policy chair. He has spent several months crisscrossing Canada in search of votes.
Routed in the last federal election, a demoralized Liberal Party is trying to redefine itself and regain a toehold on relevance.
Inevitably, its policies on everything from investing in transportation infrastructure to fostering renewable energy to legalizing and regulating cannabis – and how it arrives at them – will be front and centre in that exercise.
Another top priority is new blood. “One of the party's challenges is we haven't undergone a true generational change for too long,” veteran party strategist Rob Silver allows. “The same now old [people], mostly white, mostly men, have been running things for decades. Zach's a fresh face, with fresh perspectives. That's a good thing for the party, whether he wins or loses next weekend.”
Still, smart as Mr. Paikin may be, it clearly says something about the state of Liberal desperation that he – and two other under-25-year-olds – stand a chance of taking command of the national policy reins. Such a coup would have been unthinkable even five years ago.
If it seems the height of chutzpah for a university student to stake a claim to the party's inner sanctum of power, a few minutes in Mr. Paikin's company will probably suffice to establish that he is no ordinary 20-year-old.
The firm handshake, the steady eye contact, the polished, measured sound bite – virtually everything about him suggests precocity, an ability to deliver the external grammars of modern political engagement. More critically, he has mastered the content too – a facile gift for assimilating and regurgitating key facts, numbers and issues.
Nor, in politics or out, will it hurt that Mr. Paikin is fluently bilingual (courtesy of high-school matriculation from the Lycée Français de Toronto), more than functional in Hebrew, Arabic, German, Italian and Spanish, and boasts “a tiny bit of Mandarin.” He is now working on Farsi.
Ironically, Mr. Paikin's problem may be that he is at once too fast, too glib and too intense to be taken with the seriousness he covets and may deserve.
“Zach is absolutely a credible candidate,” says Alf Apps, the party's president. “He's a rising star and a good thinker. He has the courage of his convictions and does not blow with the wind. So he's a serious guy. And he has the momentum of those seeking a generational shift. But he is up against some tough competition.”
Can Mr. Paikin actually win next week? “I wouldn't rate it as likely,” says one senior Liberal strategist, who requested anonymity. “Zach is a great young guy, obviously very bright, a bolt of enthusiasm, wonderfully keen. But a lot of Liberals are shaky about putting the policy process in the hands of someone who is too young to rent a car. And there are three candidates under age 25, so even Liberal youth are not 100 per cent behind him. It would be a lot easier if he had that solid phalanx. Zach doesn't.”
