Is being young in politics enough?

There is something curious about age. A friend of mine who recently turned 24 claims she feels her cerebral cortex is more developed and so she makes better decisions. I just got death anxiety. Age also plays an important role in politics, from the American gerontocracy to the youth-led protests that erupted across the globe last year. Age can become symbolic of change, of difference. We think of the establishment as the old, and the young as shakers of politics. Italian poet F.T. Marinetti exalted the vigour of youth in politics. In his 1909 Futurist manifesto, he raved about how the young would sweep in and destroy the politics of the old, creating a new, better world of the future. Marinetti also co-wrote the fascist manifesto.

Thankfully, the student politicians whom I’m writing about today are nowhere near Marinetti’s views. Marinetti and other fascists' inclinations to lionize youth and push toward renewal serve as a stark reminder — a rhetoric of destroying the old often comes from a reactionary place. This shorthand causes young people in politics to be assessed inaccurately, making praise of rejuvenation or change appear superficial. Too little attention is paid to any substance underneath the vibes.

The opposite is also true. I often hear young politicians being unfairly criticized as unready. This criticism is justified by their supposedly undeveloped brains or lack of experience. Neither of these criticisms is relevant. The idea that our brains finish developing at 25 is untrue. Humans didn’t evolve to become better at politics. A “more developed” brain is not better at politics. If “developed” brains were better at politics, the push to fight one of our most existential crises would not have been motivated by a 16-year-old Swedish girl. Experience is more complex, but assuming no young people have experience is ridiculous. Young people are often catalysts of positive change.

While it helps that youth are less encumbered by outdated ideas, biases or habits, any “modern” approaches become irrelevant without activism, organizing and a theory of change.

The assumption that youth inherently brings change can be rhetorically useful for young candidates and their parties. These candidates often come from student politics: since the start of 2025, at least three former UBC student politicians have run for office. Jake Sawatzky, two-time AMS elections loser, won the New Westminster—Burnaby—Maillardville riding, unseating longtime NDP parliamentarian Peter Julian. The other two put their names in for municipal roles: Kareem Hassib, who failed to get a OneCity nomination for the Vancouver School Board, and Solomon Yi-Kieran, who is running for city council under the COPE banner.

I wanted to test my thesis, so I spoke to Yi-Kieran. A self-avowed democratic socialist, they were last year’s AMS VP external and led the campaign for the SkyTrain’s expansion towards UBC. Explaining why they ran for city council, Yi-Kieran recounted an all too familiar story from their sister and her friends who are now in their thirties and “actively moving away” from the city because rent is too expensive. Emphasizing both housing and transit, Yi-Kieran pitched a fight in defence of young people: “unless somebody is actively fighting for younger generations in this city, we're never going to have the progress we need.”

When asked to comment on whether other politicians understand young people, they claimed our current representatives “haven't been understanding and haven't been acting for us.” Yi-Kieran thinks they can do better, citing their positive record with the AMS and the creation of the Youth Climate Corps. They also claimed young people have never “really had representation in city council,” noting how at 20 they would be the youngest councillor ever — by a “pretty wide margin,” compared to Jenny Kwan, who was elected at 26. Excluding personal plaudits, it's unclear how this milestone is of any significance.

Admittedly, I didn’t have extremely high expectations. Though they continuously claimed to have no intention to run for higher office until recently, Yi-Kieran’s posturing was clear. As VP external, Yi-Kieran would consistently find themself in great photo ops, posing with the most powerful politicians in the province like BC Green party leader Emily Lowan or Premier David Eby.

Having spoken to them, it is no surprise that they racked up countless endorsements for their candidacy — from former COPE politicians, NDP party activists, political organizers, UBC advocacy groups, the Young NDP and even Lowan herself. I get the appeal; Yi-Kieran is undoubtedly charismatic.

But the further I got from our interview, the more I started to notice issues with their campaign. Our agreements may seem like a slam dunk; after all, we are both on the left, Gen Z, in the Trans Umbrella and broadly optimistic about COPE as a political movement. None of the policies they campaigned on during the nomination period were major red flags, and many of them I was broadly supportive of. But for all the leftist language they engage in, most policies felt decidedly shallow.

The policy I found most concerning was advertised as “RateMyProf for the housing market.” This policy, a Solomon original, proposed creating a landlord database, presumably rating landlords. Though one of their more detailed proposals, it does not seem well thought-out. Yi-Kieran recognizes that waiting for the market to resolve itself is insufficient. I agree.

This policy, however, does not address the root of the issue; instead, it relies on market logic.

If the market is creating the problem, more information does nothing to alleviate its pressures. When searching for my current rental, I was given a “take or leave” offer, which I had just a couple of hours to respond to. Had I taken too long, my landlord would have simply made an offer to one of the many others who had shown interest in the place. (I was the second person offered the unit that day.) The landlord had all the leverage, not because I lacked information but because of market pressures — there is a lot of demand for housing, relative to supply. This is especially significant due to the inelastic demand; “consumers” will accept rent increases because being unhoused is worse than paying an exorbitant rent. This creates a coercive structure, where you are forced to accept non-ideal offers under time pressure because you are not guaranteed a better offer. Simply put, “RateMyProf for landlords” will do nothing to change the structural problems. When asked directly, Yi-Kieran understood my critique. Yet they offered little in response other than clarifying it would be one in a myriad of policies. (The best of those policies were also offered by other left-of-centre candidates.)

Their proposals are not particularly radical, but they aren't bad. Yi-Kieran was even able to eloquently argue for policies I was originally skeptical about — like one simplifying legislative texts, which had seemed like unproductive populism. Yi-Kieran noted that jargony policy proposals often serve to distance the people from democracy because the average person doesn’t have the skills needed to decipher policy from long and unnecessarily complex texts. If we are to encourage mass participation in City Hall, making politics and policies easier to understand would be a crucial step. While sometimes lacking in substance, compared to other former student politicians, Yi-Kieran has policy chops.

Contrast them with Liberal MP, former Liberal student volunteer and perennial AMS candidate Jake Sawatzky. Both engage in a lot of posturing, but Yi-Kieran accurately diagnoses many of the ills in our society. Sawatzky can't. This is perhaps best exemplified by their forays into opinion writing. When Yi-Kieran wrote an opinion essay for The Tyee on the financial struggles universities will face as a result of limiting international students, they accurately interpreted the issues. The solution was somewhat lukewarm, only given a paragraph at the end, proposing “the province properly fund higher education” and maintain the 2 per cent cap on tuition increases.

Late last year, Sawatzky wrote about political polarization in Freshnet News’s opinion section. He engaged in vacuous platitudes about political division while agreeing with other parties’ most uncontroversial policies. Ironically, while calling for nuance, he failed to present any. Instead, he merely approved the Bloc’s interest in preserving the French language and the Greens’ focus on the environment. These suggestions contribute nothing to the political debate. An effective argument for working across the aisle would require nuance about the ways in which cross-party agreements can help improve the lives of those living in Canada — or at least suggestions of plausible avenues for depolarization. If stating obvious agreements was the goal, perhaps next time he might also list his long-standing agreement with journalists about the importance of breathing for staying alive. For all the good that will do.

I am not the first to think student politicians turned professional politicians should arouse suspicion. A month or so back (before Keir Starmer resigned as U.K. Prime Minister, but when there were ample speculations about his downfall) former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was asked about a potential Wes Streeting premiership. Streeting, for those unfamiliar, is a classic centre-left (emphasis on centre) politician who seems to have wanted power from birth. Corbyn said Streeting “is trained in the dark arts of student politics. And I think the last thing this country needs is student politics running it.”

We could interpret the rise of student politicians by assuming there is some self-selection at play. Student politicians are those who wanted power from the start. If that’s the case, it makes sense to start climbing the ladder at the bottom: youth parliaments, youth party organizations and student politics. These are places you can gain name recognition, build your CV and make connections with higher-level politicians. Sawatzky, Yi-Kieran and many others followed this path. Under this interpretation, any claims about not wanting to become career politicians can be quickly discredited as an electoral smoke screen. Not showing higher ambitions is a part of politics — this is just an extension.

In Yi-Kieran's case, their intention to run for higher office had been obvious to me from early in their VPX term. They clearly have a way of finding themselves on camera, often alongside a big name in politics. In that sense, I never bought the lack of intention for running for office.

Perhaps power-seeking is all there is to it, though there is another, more tantalizing, perspective to explore. What if the student-to-politician pipeline is less a process of self-selection and more a natural outcome of how politics is structured?

Imagine you are a young, politically engaged person. You want to make the world a better place — whatever your focus is — and you genuinely care. Given our political system, you might naturally think politics is done in Parliament, and electoral politics is the best way to get change done. You select a party which you feel best aligns with your values. You start at the Young New Democrats and advocate for the adoption of policies you care about. It comes to nothing. You become a staffer, hoping to affect policy, but you find the internal party process is not very democratic. In fact, the party is filled with careerists. Disillusioned, you go into student politics and seem to get some momentum, but you can do more. You find a different party; maybe this one is better. You run for city council; maybe there you’ll make the most change. Running for higher office and being the face of change feels better than being stuck doing advocacy without a finish line in sight.

This is not a hypothetical. In fact, it’s how Yi-Kieran recounted their journey. While I wish them well in their campaign and their endeavours, I do have higher expectations for Yi-Kieran’s new party COPE than the BC NDP.

This story shows the downfalls of electoral politics. You join to make change and get stuck in political bureaucracy and ambition. The original goals you had are replaced by new ones, with little thinking outside a specific partisan logic. This process doesn’t end your candidacy — quite the opposite.

The story continues. You hope your campaign will be different, but you’ve been so entrenched in partisan careerist politics that you don’t even notice you are replicating the same means-tested, electorally-expedient politics you had decried. Your policies sound radical but lack substance. (Not your fault; electoral politics doesn't incentivize novel thinking.) Once elected, you work under parliamentary logic and pass policies that improve people's lives — even if you don’t upend the systems that created the ills you oppose. It feels productive, and you are making a change. You might have never actually aimed to become one of the careerists. By the end of your term, you find there is this one project you care about that's almost done. You just want to get it over the line, so you run for re-election. Next thing you know, you have been in electoral politics for years, becoming the exact type of politician you objected to.

This could be the path of any politician. It can suck you in, even if you didn’t set out for it. Student politicians enter politics at a young age. Their formative political thought is moulded by partisan logic. While I don’t necessarily doubt their good intentions, I am skeptical student politicians will bring truly radical change.

Marinetti wasn’t right about many things, but his instinct that radical change has to come from outside a system stuck in its own habits might be one of the few things he got right. His mistake — aside from the fascism obviously — was assuming that youth itself means coming from the outside. Though we shouldn’t lionize any politician, their background matters — especially if we are hoping for a break in how politics is being done.

There is an important difference between those who lived working-class struggles before entering politics, be it as waitresses, dishwashers, trade unionists or community organizers, and those who spent their entire life in partisan and student politics. Youth or posturing doesn’t preclude you from becoming a lifelong partisan politician.

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