Hello and welcome to my TPOL or transitional presentation of learning to cap off the 2021/22 school year. The big question this presentation is supposed to ask is why I am ready to move on to the next grade level, and I’m here to display just how my learning has been forwarded this year. But first, I must start with the TPOL initiation speech.

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner

The first topic which I would like to discuss in this presentation is my MPOL, which can be found here. In this presentation I used the Manhattan Project Project as an example of my progress as a learner. One of the important elements of that project was the Socratic seminar, a format of in class discussion (not debate) to build on an idea. This is usually unmoderated, and you speak as you please. During the Hiroshima project I was able to participate in the seminars and be accomplished in the task, but recently in our latest project we were reintroduced to the format and I can see my improvement. In the Cray Cray Yay Yay project during the seminar related to the film Gandhi I was far more effective and able to speak on several occasions during the seminar, which is usually very difficult as I’m very skilled at getting interrupted when trying to speak. 

Also relevant when comparing these two projects and my performance during them is my final product to present at an exhibition. In my Manhattan Project piece I was able to convey and idea both literally and metaphorically but not harness relevant personal interests and as much of a creative element as the Spring Exhibition allowed me to, mind you the former was under the confines of conceptual art. There was also a measurably difference response from my audience between the two exhibitions whereas in the first one my piece felt almost glossed over but this time it seemed heavily appreciated.

This nicely brings me into my main achievement I would like to put forward in this presentation, my work for the Spring Exhibition. My post for that can be viewed here. As I mentioned before, I believe it to be my strongest learning this year. I think that my portrait for this project represents this. This portrait showcased my ability to evaluate community, evaluate meanings of text, explore the effects of individual impact, convey ideas to others as well as collaboration in a group to display several portraits in a cohesive and logical way.

To start, in developing it I explored my community as well as its roots and history to find significant influence and impact which radiated enough to affect me to this day. In this exploration as well as the viewing of relevant texts in class I was able to derive meaning and evaluate psychological characteristics of those who make the biggest impacts on the world and their community.

My next point is where the metaphorical meaning of my portrait comes in, evaluating impact and portraying that to others. I think my portrait was a perfect display of this in that it was simple enough that it could be easily understood, but had a solid foundational meaning behind it. That being that change is permeative within the community below our feet or you could say over our head in that we do not appreciate the contributions of certain individuals to our communities and how drastically their impact has affected everyone around us. When displaying my portrait I would say that “You always see the bridge but not who’s behind it” to play with this meaning a little.

But this isn’t the only project which displayed my ability to communicate whether it be as a group or to communicate ideas to others. In relation to the former, since the start of the year I think I have been displaying this like with my Think You Could Do Better project and video, which I could effectively combine my background knowledge with to further my team’s work.

As for communicating ideas to others, I think that my Sounds of Poetry project is a good example as it focused on the ability to portray your interpretations of music in both writing and verbally. Looking at this can also show my improvement later this year too though, as my writing later on and especially with my Spring Exhibition stuff which felt more direct to the point and put together.

Another important skill is note taking, and I think I have greatly improved on this. Linked here is my notes for the viewing of Gandhi, which I would like to use as an example of my note taking.

Returning to the main idea of the TPOL, I think that these examples have clearly shows my understanding of a diverse range of subject related skills and competencies which can be put forward to furthering my learning in the future. This also all relates well to my learning plan goals of thinking outside the box, communicating purposefully, using my strengths among others mentioned in my learning plan for the year.

Hey and welcome back to my blog. The time has yet again passed where the entire PLP community showcases our learning from the year in our annual Spring Exhibition. Finally being the most senior class in the program, we were able to act as the culmination of the event and the biggest display. Our topic was community, which ones we’re part of, people who have shaped them and specifically community impact makers on the North Shore.

What is a community impact maker you may ask. Well, the definition our class had was that a community impact maker is someone within a community who identifies a problem and then figures out and implements a solution to such problem, leaving an impact on that community and making the world a better place.

The Project:

We were tasked to choose who we thought was an important community impact maker, and there was a very wide variety of individuals our class picked. For mine I decided to go a while back in time to the 1930s, when the North Shore was a sparsely populated area vastly separated from the rest of the Lower Mainland. One man decided he could change all this though, and his name was Alfred James Towle Taylor.

He envisioned a bridge to cross Burrard Inlet and to have it allow the North Shore to prosper as an early suburb of Vancouver. There were however many obstacles both political and financial in nature, but Alfred solved them all by cleverly leveraging the municipality of West Vancouver to sell large amounts of land to the Guinness Family to be populated as what are now the British Properties and in return the Guinness Family would fund the bridge and municipal infrastructure. Alfred then worked to design both the British Properties and the Lions Gate bridge. This bridge was so crucial because it allowed the North Shore to become a connected and the nominally suburban community that we are today, and has defined our local economy, employment, recreation and culture. An isolated north shore just wouldn’t be the same especially population wise. Due to this huge impact I think it’s a shame how little recognition he gets, and how the Guinness Family is assumed to be behind everything.

Here is my little write up displayed at the exhibition to give context to Alfred.

Having chosen my individual, I had to decide on a way to adequately represent him as a portrait. When thinking about this I came up with the idea to 3d design and print a structure which would appear from one angle to just be a bridge yet from another it would appear as Alfred’s face. This would fit my individual perfectly as he was a quiet individual who didn’t like to be very recognizable in the public eye. The line I used during my exhibition presentation was “You always see the bridge but not who’s behind it”, which I think encompasses the situation and my portrait perfectly. Here’s a photo of the Lions Gate Bridge which I based my portrait on.

I was able to accomplish my plan fairly successfully, as I was able to use an traced outline of Alfred that I made and turn it into a 3d shape, which I could then add pillars to and duplicate, to get the two pieces of my end product. I could then use a soldering iron to melt off and melt together the necessary parts. I then used some wire to make the bridge cables. You can see my final product just below from the two angles.

The Exhibition:

For the exhibition I was placed into the business related group, which made total sense due to the capitalistic nature of my impact maker and his goals. This group was dominated by grade 10s but the two of us grade 11s managed to effectively communicate with them and organize our group with the necessities for the exhibition to go smoothly, which it did.

Throughout the evening I presented my portrait to various individuals, who virtually all complimented its originality, message and apparent cleverness, with one person even saying it was the best they saw all night. I think that this is reflective of the deep thought and representation built into my portrait, since it works to not only relate an individual to the community, but to characterize their achievements in a practical and straightforward way. It uses not words but rather images the audience can recognize and relate to so it can tell it’s story.

I think my biggest takeaway from this project is that change is permeative and spreads exponentially throughout a community, affecting and likely leading to unfathomable numbers of events and other changes that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. The Lions Gate Bridge and it’s impact is a perfect local example of this and how it relates to our lives today.

Hey and welcome back to my blog. In a time such as this, polarizing and divisive issues affect many of us. As a result, for one of our latest projects, we chose an issue that we would use to practice our persuasive writing with as well and choose an audience to try and convince.

One of the main aspects of the projects and how we started off was a writing record, where we recorded research, various activities as well as thoughts. This allowed us to collect our information and use it to build our understanding as well as formulate our final product, and became quite a long document.

The topic I choice to focus on was internet censorship policies of private companies, primarily social media. I was able to choose my topic fairly quickly as this one stood out in my experiences and in how widespread and commonly discussed it is today. The idea behind my argument was that censoring certain content online ends up encouraging it further through various means. The thesis statement I came up with was “Some individuals hold the view that certain things should be blocked from the ability to be published online due to the supposed harm they cause, but can mere words really be that harmful?”. This is far more general than my specific argument but emphasizes the idea that content censorship is ineffective in deterring certain viewpoints from being expressed.

When writing out my arguments, I did so over a significant period so my writing ended up being somewhat jumbled, which likely did more to confuse my audience. However, I do think that I was able to emphasize my strongest points with their placement in my writing. The format that I chose was a magazine article like essay, because I thought that would be a format which my audience would read. You can read my argument below.

My chosen individual for my audience was my mother who holds significantly different views on the subject that I do. When provided with the article she said that it was hard to follow some of my points, but that the end was fairly persuasive. She however said due to her experiences she didn’t agree with the concept.

Despite not convincing my audience I think I was able to display my arguments in an effective and engaging length and format, and was able to investigate my own opinions on a relevant topic further.

I think the most important thing I’ve learned from this project is the importance of formulating and understanding your own opinion on a topic before you can express that in a way that will be effective in convincing others.

Welcome back to my learning portfolio. This post will be my reflection on the latest PLP project, one which dove into the meaning behind poetry and music. The goal of the project was to be able to thoroughly dissect these forms of media to identify the poetic devices used throughout and the implications they have to the tone and meaning of the pieces, as well as to evaluate their appeal to us personally. The driving question for the project was “How might we use music to represent text and ourselves?”.

Throughout the the project, we established our knowledge of poetic devices and their applications in popular poems and music. This took various forms from quizzes to memorize poetic terms to activities discussing poetry with small groups. One such activity was where we were tasked with answering various questions about poetic devices in 8 different poems which drew on our knowledge in a more practical sense than things like the quizzes.

Then came the time for the primary assignment of the project, which was to choose five songs that have some personal appeal to us and evaluate the reasons they do, as well as identify the subtleties in the way the songs are written. We began by making a playlist, hence the assignments name “Playlist Of My Life”. I chose songs that spanned multiple genres and focused on a wide variety of topics rather than similar ones, which would have shown a more monotone thought process and not allowed me to discover the strengths in songs of different topics which allow them to project as powerful a message as they do. You can listen to my playlist here.

Here are my analysis’ of my five chosen songs. I believe that I was able to strongly analyze their meaning and was able to find the reasoning for their personal appeal beyond just sounding nice and being fun to listen to. Mind you the value of the songs are also situational in that an analysis in a certain mood and lens like these were written do not fully reflect their merit in relatability. You can click on each song’s box to read my analysis.

There was one more task however before I was finished. We would have to present our evaluations to several classmates. For the presentation in class of these I decided to present a summarized version of my full analysis, as well as to show the album cover released with it or a screenshot of the applicable music video and describe how it relates to the song. I think that this was probably my weakest part of this project as having no predetermined script and not reading off of my analysis’ for most of the time hurt the delivery of my message. I wasn’t really able to translate the text to presentation.

Here’s a photo of me describing the relevance of a screenshot from the music video for “Life Is A Highway” by Tom Cochrane during the presentation.

Finally, my answer to the driving question of how we can use music to represent ourselves and text is to merely observe. Our listening habits like other media consumption stem from a variety of sources and themselves reflect ourselves in many ways. We can observe what songs we listen to in any mood, situation, time and not only see our ways of thinking but also our values, insecurities and all else. Music has been a powerful expression throughout history for a reason, whether listening to or performing it. Therefore we don’t need to use music to represent ourselves when we are not writing it, our taste and interpretation in media is what the music already showcases, we can just use it to show such in a human and relatable manner.

Welcome to my mid-year Presentation Of Learning or mPOL. Thus far this school year I have been able to utilize and hone my skills in producing and evaluating various forms of media and literature. A good example of this is the first project of the year. Titled “Think you can do better?” it was a project that focused on Canadian politics and was timed with the federal election. My role in this project was a good display of drawing on pre-existing knowledge and leadership. I took the lead in my group, completing most of the work and guiding the group. This is a reflection of my collaborating competency profile, which is about sharing roles and responsibilities with peers. In this situation I did my own part but also did more. This is probably also the best example of my chosen profile for the positive personal and cultural identity competency, knowing that I’m part of a larger community. This also represents the positive personal and cultural identity as to write stuff in a professional political sense this is a must.

But this isn’t just about what I’ve done previously. The important thing is looking forward at how I can improve. For this I would look at our most recent project, “Sounds of Poetry”. In this project the primary task was to write 5 analyses of songs and their meaning. In this regard I believe that I effectively showed my understanding of the poetic meaning aspect of the project quite well. However, once completed our task was to present several of these analyses to our peers. This was more difficult seeing as I wasn’t particularly attuned to converting my righting to a format like that. This brings me to my primary point in mentioning this, that the improvement I should work for moving forward is to be able to transfigure a product in a field which I show strength to one which can better communicate an answer to the driving questions of any project. This is a reflection of my communicating competency profile, which is to use a variety of forms to communicate clearly and purposefully. This also shows the critical and reflective thinking profile I’ve chosen, to evaluate well-chosen evidence to make interpretations, due to my work interpreting meanings of the various songs.

I believe that both of the projects used as examples thus far are good examples of the personal awareness and responsibility competency which I chose that is about recognizing my strengths and weaknesses.

Another way which I could evaluate my progress is in reference to my statement of learning intent which we crafted at the beginning of the year as part of our learning plans. In this I stated that to enhance my learning I must explore greater context and implications to events in focus to gain a better understanding of concepts and competencies. I believe that in this regard I’ve succeeded, as my work in the Manhattan Project project could attest to. In this project I constructed a conceptual art piece which represented not only the context to the Manhattan Project but it’s long term and cultural effects too. On one hand it provided commentary on the culture of complacency which increasing government secrecy has generated like the frog in boiling water apologue; showing the implications. But on the other hand it also provided a real world related situation to give context to the situation at hand. This is a good representation of my creative thinking competency profile of thinking outside the box.

Thank you for observing my mPOL and supporting my aspirations moving forward.

Hello and welcome back to my blog. Recently we had our first exhibition of the year, and in this post I will talk about the experience as well as the project which went along with it.

To begin, the idea of the project which we would showcase at the exhibition was to tie together the idea of conceptual art with the Manhattan Project and start of the nuclear age. We would be making conceptual art pieces about the development of nuclear weapons.

In the beginning of the project, we explored many aspects of the Manhattan Project, like the science behind it, the geopolitical context of the period, and the consequences of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War. In regards to this, we read and critiqued the book Hiroshima by John Hersey, which I previously wrote a critical summary on that you can see here. The goal of reading this book was to understand the consequences of the bombings, but more significantly to warn of the consequences if a full scale nuclear war were to break out afterwards. As well as the critical summary at the end, throughout our reading of the book we went through 3 Socratic seminars where we discussed various aspects of the literature and debated on topics such as historical significance of individuals, the book, among others. These discussions allowed for us to generate a more developed perspective on the meaning behind the book and historical significance as a whole.

But the consequences of the Manhattan project aren’t all bad, we also looked into the advances in medicine, power generation and culture which in many ways contributed to current prosperity in much of the world, including Japan.

On the conceptual art side of the project, we began by learning the history of the art form and how it came to be. To explore the topic further, we went as a class on a field trip to the Contemporary Art Gallery, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. At the Vancouver Art Gallery there was an exhibit about the works of Yoko Ono, a very prominent conceptual artist probably best known for her relationship with John Lennon.

In this gallery our understanding of conceptual art was tested as we had to choose a piece of art to analyze. I choose a piece called “Bag Piece”, which was a black cotton bag in which an individual or two would go inside and do whatever they wanted. The viewers couldn’t see what was happening inside the bag, but the performer could vaguely see outside. My evaluation of the meaning is two fold, the first being that the individual is the art, and the bag just compliments it, giving it variation. The second being that it forces you to use your imagination and highlights the preconceived notions that may come to mind when you are forced to come up with your own meaning for what you are seeing.

Once we understood both concepts, it was time to tie them together with our exhibition pieces. I decided that for my art piece, I should attempt to convey a message and raise concern about government and military secrecy in how they created and continue to develop weapons which raise significant ethical concerns, yet there is no consultation on. I chose this because the Manhattan Project is the greatest example of this in history, having not even most of the workers know what they were making, and there were hundreds of thousands of them.

To accomplish this I decided to pull on the knowledge I acquired learning about the Manhattan Project, and base my piece on Chicago Pile-1, the secretive first nuclear reactor build below a stadium in downtown Chicago, which kickstarted the Manhattan project. I choose this because it both literally and metaphorically has the world changing “beneath our feet”, as well as being without public knowledge.

To represent this, I used a photo of the stadium the real reactor was built below, and mounted it on a black box with a translucent black curtain in front. On the curtain was the prompt “What is the cost before we ask questions? 200k lives? The human race?”, as to highlight the inaction of the people in probing these issues, and the potential for these weapons to destroy humanity. Inside the black box I placed a remote controlled arc generator which emitted light and sound. This had several meanings, the first being to serve to sort of scare yet intrigue the viewer into the reality of what happens behind closed doors. The auditory and visual affects are meant to give a hint of the big picture yet obscure it, just like the situation of the Manhattan Project workers. Also, it just serves to represent the reactor. Attached is my written explanation shown on exhibition night.

Now, for the exhibition we were put into various groups of similar art pieces. My group was science and technology, which my piece fit somewhat well for. For the room we were presenting in, we decorated with a scientific theme, wearing lab goggles, white shirts to represent lab coats, and put general items that related to the topic around the room. With some music and a introduction video at the entrance, the room came together quite well to fit the theme.

Additionally I also participated in the production of an introduction video at the entrance to the entire class’s exhibit.

The exhibition night itself went quite well, and many of the visitors were interested in my art piece and the meaning behind it. The arc generating device I had in my piece definitely got attention as well as surprised many. I think I was able to communicate both my art’s personal message, and the historical significance of the Manhattan Project quite well. Here is what the pieced looked like, however it is difficult to understand when not in person.

Having been able to learn, communicate and evaluate the consequences of the Manhattan Project, I think that it is clear that it’s effects reverberate throughout the world and it undoubtedly is one of the most historically significant events of recent centuries.

Recently in correlation with a Humanities project, I was tasked with reading the novel Hiroshima by John Hersey. A short introduction to the book would be that it is the retelling by the author of the stories of six survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, compiled in the year following the event, and then later modified to show their stories around 40 years later.

I believe that the first thing that we should establish from the text is the theme, or what we think the author wants to tell us or make us think. I believe that while this text is primarily classified as journalism, it is irrefutable that the book is framed from the perspective of survivors of the bombing, without much show of any alternative point of view. This makes it hard to weigh the ethics like a truly neutral journalistic interpretation of the events would strive for. I don’t think that you could counter this by claiming the argument is the middle ground logical fallacy either, since there is no attempt to discredit an alternative argument. This leads me to believe that the theme of this text must be: to act as a source in highlighting the at the time overlooked tragedy of the bombing and its consequences, which unfortunately fell on the deaf ears of the powers and governments of the world, who continued in their pursuit to acquire more and more destructive weapons. This would be a far more future and preventative based outlook on the events than debating the ethics of them, which is reflective of the lack of international opinions, since that would work as an alternative to make the book a more neutral source of information.

That’s my modern interpretation of the theme, but it’s important to recognize that nowadays being this many years from the war, the book does lack as much value in countering an anti Japanese hive mentality stirred by the events of the war. Not knowing that this is probably the context, may skew the modern interpretation of the theme. We could best get an interpretation of this mentality of the time from propaganda posters like the one below, which is one of the least racially insensitive of the many.

Seeing that the message is one of preventative activism, I think that the writing does a powerful job of showing this. The third person style while repeatedly dropping the name of the character we’re following makes for a more immersive story. This is because it is a reminder of the human aspect of the character which makes it easier to connect with them. Another point related to the form of writing, which I heard from discussing with others about the book, is the omniscient form of narration which shows the character’s feelings in a full and powerful way. Furthermore, the consistent emphatic tone glues the book and the 6 survivors’ stories together into a common cause. The book is also clearly aiming for stories over statistics, as it throws no numbers out—which you likely couldn’t fully comprehend the scale of, and just tells the stories bluntly.

The last section of the book puts a strong emphasis on the long term effects of the bomb. Every individuals’ story mentions long term radiation sickness issues which they had for the rest of their lives(or long periods), and we can see from quotes like this, ““If a person says to me that he is weary [darui], if it is a hibakusha who says it, it gives me a different feeling than if he is an ordinary person. He doesn’t have to explain….He knows all of the uneasiness—all of the temptation to lose spirit and be depressed—and of then starting again to see if he can do his job….”, that the shared experience and problems of survivors stick with them, while a non survivor may not understand what they’ve been through, similar to the reader of the book. And yet throughout Mr. Tantimoto’s story in this harrowing section, we see messages about more and more countries creating nuclear weapons. This map below shows which countries have ignored calls for nuclear disarmament and produced the weapons.

My personal conclusion from reading this book, is that it serves as an effective medium for spreading a message of warning to the world to think carefully about using weapons of mass destruction, or else face the severe consequences felt by the residents of Hiroshima, but on a far greater scale.

It’s difficult to come up with a single thing that is most significant to humanity. You could go with the Big Bang or God creating the earth depending on your beliefs, but to get more recent is difficult. However, we can see through how significant and widespread their impact was, which events have has a profound impact on society, and that brings me to the topic of this post. The historical significance of the invention of gunpowder.

I don’t think there is any objective opinion that can state gunpowder was an insignificant invention. It was revolutionary in every sense of the word. Revolutionary to technology, revolutionary to industry, revolutionary to armed revolutions. Even the initial formula that has lasted nearly 1200 years is still in use, and was only phased out in the mainstream at the start of the 20th century.

Since it’s inception in 9th century China, gunpowder’s influence has only grown and grown all over the world. It almost immediately saw it’s use in weapons begin in China, and gradually made it’s way west until the 13th century where it reached Europe. Europe’s lack of nomadic raiders was the perfect political and warring environment for the expansion of the gun, and how it was modified over time. 

This adoption of the gun in Europe became extremely significant during the age of exploration and colonization of the Americas, as these more advanced weapons gave the Europeans a strong advantage in colonial wars. The conquistadors in the Spanish Empire are a prime example of this, since technology like this allowed them defeat empires like the Aztec and Incans in combat.

But the gun isn’t the only thing gunpowder has been a conduit to. As it was the first explosive created in human history, it paved the way for other explosives and explosive concepts, important to the economic development of nations and life as we know it too. The use of explosives in mining being the main example that comes to mind, but also railway and road construction, avalanche control, and non military firearm purposes like hunting, sport and pest extermination. Even the combustion engine used in most vehicles relies on a concept of controlled explosions to function. 

You could even find all sorts of symbols which don’t directly involve gunpowder, but are a result of it nonetheless. What’s known as the anonymous mask or Guy Fawkes mask for example, doesn’t use gunpowder, but has prominence because of the gunpowder plot to blow up the House of Lords in the early 1600s.

All of this is possible, just because of a few Chinese monks 1200 years ago. I think this is not only a strong example of historical significance, but also the butterfly effect, as one individual looking for medicine influenced an unthinkable number of events and lives, all across the world.

Hello and welcome back to my blog. As you may have seen from my last two posts, the project and focus of my PLP work over the past month and a half has been Canada’s political system. The main idea of the project was to understand how the system works, and what change we would like to see. This project felt very relevant to me as I am generally quite interested in Canadian politics, and have quite of sophisticated knowledge of our system.

The first milestone of this project, which coincided with the timing of the 2021 Canadian federal election, was to just write a reflection about the 2021 election as a blog post, which you can see here. I focused on a topic that I found very interesting that I had personally looked into during the 2019 election, which was the effect that the People’s Party of Canada had on the election. I also talked about my criticisms of the Senate of Canada under the current system.

Next was the main part of the project, which was creating a theoretical political party that would represent the changes we would personally want to see in policy and our system. In my group for this task were Alexee, Grace and Owen. Their blogs are linked here if you would like to check our their posts. Once we had our group, we had to brainstorm ideas for party policy that we could all agree with, but agreeing with each other didn’t turn out to be too much of an issue.

We started putting together our party by making a statement of intent slideshow, showing the main points our party will cover that we discussed previously. Though ours lacked aesthetics and detail, it does showcase quite well our understanding of what we would change about our political system if we could.

Next was a press release, which we went far deeper on the content mentioned in the statement of intent. You can see my post about that here. This is where we ironed out our policies that would be used for our final platform and video later on.

Finally, we made a video ad for our party to showcase our platform in under two minutes. This can be seen above. We try to follow a model of highlighting issues, and then providing our solutions to them for the ad in a sort of storyline to follow, where our party is shown as the solution to our problems. The video is a mix of my group members and I talking, as well as relevant Creative Commons images throughout with captions quoting what we are saying we should change to best govern ourselves.

Since our party is based on representing all of Canada, we tried to make the backgrounds we talk against be as relevant as possible to all of Canada while just filming in our local area. This led us to pick one location by the water to film to represent the coasts, one by apartments to represent an urban environment, one in a forest to represent more of rural or remote Canada and one section at the school to represent the younger generation.

The video came together quite well except the flow of transition between a couple of the policies. Or so we thought, as when we presented our video, a volume error in the editing made our section about the Senate and Supreme Court into a loud cacophony of noise that sounded like it would destroy the speakers it was playing on, but we fixed that right after.

Now, earlier in the project we used a tool called the CBC Vote Compass, which asks you questions about different political issues, and compares your results to the major political parties. I decided to take the test using our party platform for the answers, answering neutral or the status quo for ones we don’t cover, and then added our party acronym to the chart. You can see where the tool thinks our party stands below. It is about where I would expect, except more socially conservative which is odd seeing as our party is based on neutrality on social issues, which leads me to think that the compass may potentially conflate regional issues applicable to the west as socially conservative based on a sort of political stereotypes rather than their real applications.

Thank you for reading my blog, I hope you enjoyed this latest update on my learning in PLP.

Hello and welcome back to my blog. Our most recent project in PLP, is to think up a new political party with a group. The party my group has come up with, is the Dominion Revival Party. Our party is for the people. Our primary policy and goal is governmental reform so all Canadians have a more equal voice, and we can eliminate regional preferences. The name stems from the fact that we are trying to revive the founding principles of our dominion, one of which is representation of all people/regions.

One of our biggest policies is senate reform. This is relevant to one of my most recent posts which was about the 2021 Federal Election, in which I talk about many issues with the Senate of Canada as it is. The biggest thing that we think needs to be changed in the senate is the seat distribution. Currently BC, Alberta and Ontario are significantly underrepresented. We vow to change that. As for the appointment aspect of the senate, we do not wish for an elected senate as to not cause a battle for power and legitimacy between the two houses.

Another issue of regional representation that we would like to fix is Supreme Court appointment quotas, as by guaranteeing an overly large amount of seats to one region, you deny others their fair share, as well as potential talent a chance.

Lots of people like to use proportional representation as their buzz word for electoral reform, but we actually see the issues with it, and wish for better changes to our system. Our party believes in a maintenance of first past the post ridings as they better represent the constituents in them, and allow MPs to bring up localized issues. However, we will implement a system where all federal ridings are reviewed every five years (every census) to ensure they are fair, and redone if they have large population disparities. Also in regard to MPs representing their constituents, we believe that having a set social policy in our party is a negative, so we maintain that party politics should stay out of social policy and those matters should be proposed and voted on with freely by MPs representing their constituents rather than parties as a whole.

Our party is based on a centrist economy policy, but we do believe in responsible spending by government. Part of this, along with being more fair to all regions, is to reform the equalization payment formula, as it unnecessarily gives extra money to certain provinces when it isn’t needed, and they can cover more of their own expenses.

If you want to hear our other members takes on our policies, you can check out their blogs too. They are Alexee, Grace and Owen.