How should we govern ourselves? A question that humans have asked ourselves since the beginning; yet throughout all the ages, there has never been a clear, unchanging answer. Throughout the most recent project, we learnt all about government and even put ourselves through the shoes of politicians all to figure out how should we govern ourselves.
What we did?
So far, I have already written two blog posts on this project. Combined, they should cover quite a bit of what we learners have done so here are the links:
Anyways, beyond that, we finished our final milestone which is creating our parties press release video. I’m happy to say that the video was well received however due to time limitations, it was not fully complete. Here is HPC’s final video!
Driving Question:
Now moving on to what this summative post is meant to be about, answering the driving question, I should first start off with how I believe we should govern ourselves. To be honest, my idea is totally different from how any government works currently. I think that if we somehow implemented a system in which nations had a sole leader who made all the policies that would be the best. Now you may think: “thats just a dictatorship” and honestly, it basically is except for one key factor, the freedom of movement. If we had allowed relocation of citizens at no cost, would this still be a dictatorship? Leaders of their own nations would have to implement policies that makes people want to stay and this means that citizens would be free to leave to a nation that most suits their political, economic and social beliefs. This seems like a crazy idea and it is but through each mile stone of my journey through this project, I have found that this idea may not be so bad after all so let’s go through each step of this project and talk about my idea of government.
Election Reflection
Our first milestone was actually the to create blog post number 1 listed above and was all about how we currently run our Canadian government. Through this I learnt about one our main big ideas: The development of political institutions is influenced by economic, social, ideological, and geographic factors. Taking into this account I started to realize how dependant not just we are to the government, but how dependant the government is on us. So why does it always seem like the government hold so much more power? If normal citizens are always free to leave, this would force the ruling bodies of different nations to implement laws beneficial to the citizens incentivizing them to stay. This would to me allow a more stable balance of power between citizens and governments.
Party Platform
Our next milestone was about creating our party platform. This is covered in the second blog post above but to summarize it, we created our modelled parties and began shaping it into a real movement. From this, I also learnt a lot about ours second big idea: Language shapes ideas and influences others. We learnt about the importance of media and speech as every party will never get the support they need without a voice. Canada is good in the sense that citizens do get to participate in the decision making of our government but the problem is, many Canadians don’t end up having the leader they wanted. My system would allow everyone to move to a nation with policies more similar to their beliefs creating more unified states.
Press Release
Finally after creating our fundamental party platform, we began creating our press release video. This milestone builds on the past two big ideas as it is a form of media and we needed to appeal to different people who have varied ideas of what government should be like. This was another building block to my idea as it showed me the importance of competition. Through watching other parties press release videos, it was obvious that not everyone could get what they wanted. My idea not only helps politically similar people group together but also promotes peace as there should be less judgement on other nations as the people chose to be there.
Why this probably won’t work
Sadly as much as I think idea will work in theory, this is essentially impossible to implement. Current governments especially dictatorships would probably not yield it’s power to the citizens. I also think that although ultimately it would be better for people to be in a place they fit into more, people aren’t just willing to leave their homes and patriotism just for this cause. In the end this is an idea and although it may be impossible, this is how and ideal political world would be from my point of view.
Why this relates to us
I have talked about the importance of government in my past two blogs and I can’t stress enough the effects we have on the government so ultimately is our duty to do our research and vote to build a better Canada.
Now that’s all for now and I’ll see you soon in my next project Mrs Willemse everyone!
Sources:
Government lecture 1 by Mrs Willemse
Government lecture 2 by Mrs Willemse
Government lecture 3 by Mrs Willemse
Government lecture 4 by Mrs Willemse
Government lecture 5 by Mrs Willemse
Government lecture 6 by Mrs Willemse
Government lecture 7 by Mrs Willemse
Government lecture 8 by Mrs Willemse
Government worksheets given out by Mrs Willemse
who’s Mrs Willemse