Hey guys, this is Randy again. Today I’m reflecting/summarizing on my most recent project, “Think you can do better?” In this project the class was asked to answer the driving question, “How should we govern ourselves?” We were thinking about our answers as we went through each milestone, and is my answer to the driving question: I think that we should govern ourselves in a way that we can build the economy while protecting the environment so that we can increase the life qualities for all Canadians. This answer might seem broad, but we’ll dive deeper into it at the end.
Introduction to politics and political parties:
The exciting part of this project is that we get to make political parties and create our own campaign videos. But before we made our own political party we had to know what makes a government, and how political parties work. In the first milestone we were asked to write a blog post on how the Canadian government functions, and support our opinions with our evidence and media. We spent a lot of time in class learning the structure of the government and voting system. After having a basic understanding of the Canadian government, and taking a few quizzes, we were able to write our first blog post.
(Click here to see the blog post)
In this blog post, I discussed my opinions on the current government, the structure of Canadian government, and how elections work. Overall, I had a great opinion and evidence to support it, however, my opinion was that the liberal party has not done a great job at taking care of the whole country. I also talked about the government structure. The part where I explained the government structure didn’t have a clear connection to my opinion and it was not supportive, so instead I should’ve went deeper down and supported my opinion with better evidence. Anyways, we learned the pros and cons of the current election system. This helped me to find my answer on which election system would suit Canada the best.
As we went over how the current election system works, we also learned the alternatives that could work in Canada. Right now we use a system that’s called “first past the post”, which means that the candidates with the highest voting at each riding will be the elected MP. For example, at Burnaby, North-Seymour riding, the Liberal party won by having 39%, and the rest 61% of the votes did not count. In this election 11 million Canadians did not vote, because they either thought that their votes wouldn’t make a difference, or there is no one worthy to vote for. Now, in order to make a better government for the citizens, more choices and opportunities are needed when it comes to an election.
The smaller parties such as the Green party, or the PPC supports the other voting system, which is “proportional representation”. The proportional voting system benefits the entire country in the long run, because it would split the power between the parties evenly, create more choices and opportunities, and is less likely to lead to extremism, and exaggerated regionalism. Thanks to the current election system, the French parties have a disproportional amount of MPs, and too much power. The bigger parties do not support this idea of proportional voting, because they would have way less seats, since they don’t have majority of the votes.
Next up, the teacher assigned different people into different groups based on their results in the voting compass. Through the voting compass, we were able to know our positions of our political ideologies. In my group, we had me, Dries, Ethan, Annie, and Ryan. Together, we formed a political party. Although we didn’t agree on everything, we tended to work things out. We summarized a slideshow of some of our common values and promises that we all agreed on, then we made up our party name and slogan. It was a rough draft of our party platform, but later on we made some improvements. It was at this point of time, when I started thinking what makes a good government, and how our party is special and better than every other parties out there.
(Original) 
We then created a poster as our official platform outline. We did not just included our values, promises and policies, but we also added WHY YOU should choose our party. As a group, our focus was to build up the economy so it can thrive while keeping our environment clean and healthy. We will do this by changing taxes, creating a freer market and using cleaner energy. It was good to have all of this, but we did a way better job in the campaign video. (Check out my party)
In our campaign video, we convinced people to vote for us with big goals as our future plan. We focused on environment as well as economy, such as tax changing, transporting goods, and eliminate fossil fuels. We believe that social equality is important to a balanced society, therefore we support freedom of speech, and people speaking up for themselves. We want to unify Canada by supporting its different views and cultures. I believe, in order to make people’s lives better, we need to reduce the cost of living and protect our mother nature. Having a strong economy can prevent Canada being in debt again, and help its people by having more budget and taking more effective actions. Therefore, selling our natural resources and taxing the rich is necessary.
Overall, the campaign video was pretty successful. It summarized, how my team expects Canada to be in the future, and the actions that could be done. At the end of the day, no matter who is governing us, the one and only purpose of a government is to serve and protect its people, ensuring everyone’s quality of life. We not only need to take actions on climate change, but also making life more affordable for everyone.
Thank you everyone, have a great evening.