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Eckcetera: The politics of age

I am 52 years old. I tell you that because you may have noticed Coast Reporter’s coverage of election candidates includes their ages and it seems a fair exchange that they, and you, know mine.

I am 52 years old. I tell you that because you may have noticed Coast Reporter’s coverage of election candidates includes their ages and it seems a fair exchange that they, and you, know mine.

So, now that you know my age, what do you think that tells you? Some would argue it tells you a lot, and that’s one of the reasons our policy is to ask a candidate to tell us their age.

Some candidates have wondered why we’re asking, while others have wondered why we haven’t always made a point of asking.

The age question has been the focus of a little bit of coffee talk here in the newsroom and, as I’m sure you can guess, there are two camps.

In the one camp, there’s the belief that knowing a candidate’s age tells you what generational cohort they belong to, and through that, gives you some insight into their attitudes on some issues as well as their likely experience, etc.

In the other camp, there’s me.

There was a time when reporters always used age, address and marital status when identifying sources or subjects. It was common to read, “Mrs. Anne Jones, 57, of Beckwith Street, said she was sitting in the front room with her knitting when the shots rang out.”

Including someone’s age in a story can be useful in many contexts, but I’m not convinced politics is one of them.

When it comes to politics, I think age falls into a category of information that a voter who finds it especially relevant is welcome to ask, but not a category of information that’s important for me, as a reporter, to offer up as a public service.

To explain why I fall into this camp and not the other, I’d like to tell you about Alex Munter, the city councillor who once represented my ward when I lived in Ottawa.

When Alex was elected as councillor for Kanata Ward in 2000, after Kanata merged with the City of Ottawa, he was 32 and already a decade into his career in municipal politics.

Alex is about my age and a certified member of my cohort, Generation X.

Thirty-two-year-old Sean Eckford would have made a lousy city councillor. Thirty-two-year-old Alex Munter was a very good one.

Our life and career experiences weren’t all that different, but the differences were just enough that one of us was well-suited to a seat on council and one of us was well-suited for a seat in the press gallery. Knowing our ages wouldn’t have helped anybody tell which of us best fit which role.

According to the typical thinking about our shared cohort, we both should have been apathetic slackers with a bleak, cynical and disaffected view on life (or at least that’s what the Millennials who wrote the Wikipedia entry said), making us a bad fit for either role.

So, for what it’s worth, our readers are going into this election knowing the ages of the candidates.

Here in my camp, we’ll file that information away as an interesting bit of trivia, or maybe use it pick our 6/49 numbers, but we won’t be thinking about it at the polling station.