Posted Sep. 1/05
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By Ike Awgu, BA/05 (law)
I was sitting in a boardroom at the Ottawa Citizen waiting to be interviewed about my candidacy for mayor when I arrived at an epiphany.
- Ike Awgu, BA/05 (law)
I realized that youth, including myself, routinely embraced a comforting but misguided notion that if we didn’t bother voting or paying attention to politics, then someone else would and everything would be fine. I now realize this is as much a reality as Swiss cheese is bulletproof.
In the months before the election, I’d made the decision to run for mayor with the hope that the novelty of my candidacy (being so young) would serve to highlight issues of particular importance to my demographic. Issues like safety at night, voter apathy, and affordable housing were topics I felt were being drowned in an ocean of rhetoric about bilingualism and English-French relations. Our city faced far more pressing and relevant problems that needed attention.
Running for mayor was a wake-up call, the type that goes off in the middle of the night with all your speakers blaring and a 10-man cymbal band rushing into your room. Quite literally, aside from myself and one other candidate (excluding the mayor) there were no serious candidates for the mayor’s replacement — this in our nation’s capital.
Thankfully, I discovered at a young age that the void our absence creates is often unfilled. Had I not ran for mayor, it’s unlikely that safety at night (which later became an issue) would have been highlighted, or that topics such as affordable housing and voter apathy would have been discussed. It has been said that democracy is based on the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
As for how young people can become involved politically, they can do so in the same way that older people do. They can work for candidates, become candidates, or at the very least vote and talk to their potential representatives on the phone. It’s remarkable the amount of insight one can gain into the character of candidates after speaking to them for five minutes.
Ike Awgu, BA/05, was a 19 year-old law student when he ran for mayor. He is currently a columnist for the Ottawa Sun and runs his own business.
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