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.