Steve Paikin might be the last guy you’d expect to issue a threat.
The host of The Agenda, TV Ontario’s nightly current affairs debate show, is widely esteemed for his outsized brain, respect for fair debate and unfailing politeness.
But his swagger? Not so much.
And yet, sitting in his office in a resplendent purple shirt, face smoothed by makeup and surrounded by Red Sox memorabilia and photos of his most famous interviewees — Mikhail Gorbachev, Jean Chrétien and more — Paikin has just thrown down the gauntlet.
“I defy anyone who watches the show to be able to answer that question,” he declares. The question in question? Where, exactly, he falls on the political spectrum. “I’ll tell you that I vote, and that’s all I’ll tell you,” he says. “I guess, like anyone, I have views on various issues, but you’ll never get them out of me.”
Click below to hear features editor Malcolm Johnston try to extract the political leanings out of Steve Paikin
But this much was expected. For Paikin, who this year celebrates 17 years at TVO, revealing his political leaning would be akin to Samson getting a buzz cut. His famous neutrality — along with his considerable smarts, to be sure — earned him the gig of moderator for two federal leaders’ debates, first in 2006 and again in 2008.
It’s those same ringmaster duties that Paikin performs on The Agenda.
Each weeknight, Paikin settles his lanky frame in at the head of the debate table at TVO’s Yonge and Eglinton headquarters. To each side, he’s flanked by the province’s leading authorities — MPPs, professors, authors and more — each prepared to do battle over politics, education, labour, international affairs, health care or whatever the topic of the moment happens to be.
It was that liberty, to pursue a broad range of topics, that attracted Paikin to TVO in the first place. At the time, that meant leaving CBC, where he’d shown immense promise as a rising news reporter. Paikin had spent the pivotal years of his young career living at Avenue and Wilson with his wife and three young kids, which put him close enough to CBC headquarters downtown but far enough from the core to escape the congestion.
To some of his colleagues the move to TVO seemed like a step in the wrong direction.
“They said that with their noses up and a little snooty, and I thought to myself, ‘You know, I want to go work there because the freedom to do what I want to do is going to be just much better,’” he says. “I could not have foreseen, of course, that … 17 years later and five shows later, I’m doing a single-hosted, nightly current affairs show on a hundred different things a year.”
While TVO doesn’t offer glitz or glamour or pull the same ratings as the network big boys, Paikin has helped establish his program as an important voice in the municipal, provincial and national dialogues. Along the way, he has also earned respect for himself as a moderator and host. “Steve Paikin is widely acknowledged, I think, to be as good as it gets in Canadian public affairs television,” says Paul Wells of Maclean’s, a frequent guest on The Agenda. “He is fair-minded. He trusts the audience to handle complex arguments and to stay interested when a guest talks for a long time.”
That’s not to say Paikin allows his guests to ramble on. He patrols the debate like a shark, waiting to seize upon any violation of the unspoken rules of debate, especially the most grievous sin: partisan hackery. “If someone says something that’s stupidly partisan, I’m going to call you on it. This isn’t a show where people come on to say something partisan. And if they do, they get slapped down,” says Paikin.
Slapped down? Defy? Tough talk, especially from your friendly public broadcaster, but Paikin’s ability to be simultaneously tough and courteous has been central to his success. Paikin remembers an interview with Toronto mayoral candidate George Smitherman as being tenser than most. Paikin had taken him to task on the topic of the night and in the process raised the ire of the notoriously volatile politician.
“I remember after the interview, I called him up and left a voice mail for him. I said, ‘You and I had an unusually testy interview the other night, and I don’t know if it was because you were trying to hog the mic and rag the puck or if I was too in your face, but I don’t like being unfair.’” Paikin told him that if he thought he’d been unfair, to call him back; if he didn’t hear from him, he’d assume everything was OK. A few months later, Smitherman was on the show again.
“I went into the green room, sat down and said, ‘So, the last interview we did…’ He said, ‘Did you hear from me?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘OK. So there we are.’”
To stay informed about the various and changing topics The Agenda covers, Paikin has had to master the art of constant consumption. “When I’m on the subway, walking down the street, if I’m at a baseball game, I’ve always got magazines, newspapers, research,” he says. “My approach is I don’t know what I need to know, so I’ve got to know as much as possible.”
The fear, says Paikin, is that, if he hasn’t done enough research, he won’t be able to spot when a panelist is spouting nonsense. “If someone says something and your BS meter starts going, you’ve got to be able to come back at them and go, ‘Well, actually…” he says.
For all his efforts to stay up to date on the latest efforts, hard to believe, then, that Paikin barely read the front section of a newspaper before the age of 19. That was before the fateful summer of 1980, when Paikin worked as a summer student at the Hamilton Spectator. Paikin was ecstatic at the thought of covering the Tiger Cats CFL football team for a summer. Until, that is, he learned he’d been assigned to the news beat. For a sports nut, it was a death sentence.
Up until then, Paikin hadn’t attended many classes as a freshman at University of Toronto. He was too busy working as the play-by-play man of the Varsity Blues, U of T’s sports teams, alongside colour commentator Michael Landsberg, who’s now the face of TSN’s long-standing sports debate show Off the Record. The two had a keen interest in broadcasting but were sopping wet behind the ears.
“I still have this image of a tall, skinny, curly haired Steve Paikin joining me in the broadcast booth,” says Landsberg. “He and I were kind of joined at the hip, and both of us starting out totally inexperienced.… My first day in broadcasting was his first day in broadcasting.” “We were horrible,” says Paikin. “But as per Malcolm Gladwell’s admonition that the way to get good at something is to do it 200,000 times badly and then you get good, well, that was part of our 200,000 doing it badly. We had a scream.”
In sports broadcasting, Paikin figured he’d found his calling. But working as a newsman for the Spec that summer gave him reason to consider a different career path. The job opened him up to a wider world of politics, news, education, school boards, law and more — the very same topics he encounters nightly on The Agenda.
When he returned for his second and third years at U of T, “I attended more classes” he says. Then after his third year, he headed to the Boston for journalism (and perhaps to be closer to his favourite baseball team). When he came back, his buddy Landsberg hooked him up with a job covering city hall for CHFI. Shortly thereafter, Landsberg headed for sports while Paikin stayed on with politics.
The fit has proven to be a good one. But then again, maybe Paikin’s penchant for smack talk is a sign that he hasn’t fully left his sports past behind.