How should we govern ourselves? This was the question our PLP 10 class has been working with for the course of this project, and after weeks of thinking I’ve found an answer; we should govern ourselves by taking everyone into consideration, we should embrace the positives of ours past and learn from the negatives to create a Canada better for all.Β 

Above is our final campaign video which is how we think we should govern ourselves, but to get to this answer a lot of learning was done. Our journey started off by looking at how we are currently governed and the problems with it. At the same time we were also introduced to a second project, building our second brain. Our second brain is all about trying to have better thinking, and this is done through the Zettelkasten method.Β 

Zettelkasten is a knowledge management system developed by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. The system is designed to help you clarify your thoughts, experiment with ideas, and spark new ones. Ultimately, the purpose of Zettelkasten is to make the process of writing and publishing feel like less of a β€œheavy lift” because you never start a project with blank page. Instead, you leverage your own treasure trove of collected ideas and resources that are rich with your own thoughts.

So tying this back to our government project, we had to take notes and capture our ideas on the Canadian government. I didn’t know much about politics at this point so using our new method really helped me get a better understanding of how our country works. Using this new information we’d get straight into our first main task, an Election Reflection.

An Election We Could’ve Done Without

We were asked to complete a post about prime minister Justin Trudeau calling for an election in hopes of forming a majority government with an opinion if you support it. Now you might have your own thoughts on this but personally I think it was a poor decision and was pretty much useless because I had a strong feeling nothing would change and that feeling came out to be true. When writing that post I had a thought that why is it always just the Liberals and Conservatives that get voted even though people don’t like them. As I said in that post, we try one don’t like it, and try the other and are constantly in that cycle without changing anything and that’s what I took away from that part of the project.Β 


Now knowing what the problems are with our current government it was time to get to the big part, making our own political party. After taking part in the vote compass and seeing where I was placed on the political spectrum, my groups was formed with people that have a similar view to me. This is where we started forming an answer to the driving question. Using the research from the last section, I was able to pitch some of my opinions to the group to help us get started. A common theme that kept coming up was how to be different, whenever we’d pitch some of our ides to our teacher she’d keep on saying, β€œthat already exists”. It was quite annoying to hear but it forced me to keep a growth mindset and think outside the box to make our platform points unique. While we were all so focused on the future, Quinn came up with a potential idea. Why don’t we embrace our past take what was good from it but also think about the future. This idea sparked a lot of interest in our group and opened the floodgates to many more ideas.Β 

The press release is where everything started to come together and all the ideas linked, we brought together all of the evidence we had and finally came up with an answer to the driving question. I think my group can say the same that creating a political party is much more difficult than it may first seem, especially when you are doing it with other people that won’t always think the same as you.Β 

Traditionalist Party of Canada

Going into this project I thought I would be just waiting for it to end, but actually I felt that it was actually quite intriguing to see how I would manage as the leader of a nation, even though it’s so unrealistic and definitely will not happen. The main idea I’ve got from this project is that you’re never going to have everyone agree with you, especially in politics, so it’s about finding that compromise and going from there.Β