Im gonna be honest I really hated politics, It made me bored, I didn’t understand it, I didn’t care about any of it, but this project changed how I see politics.

I realized the only reason I hated it was because I didn’t understand how it worked. I was worried when this project started because all I heard was words like Confederation? Nationalism? Founding Fathers?? Those words scared me because I had no idea what they meant, not even the slightest clue. I think I’ve blocked out anything I’ve ever been taught about government. This project I decided to really try and understand it, and it worked! I now have a way better understanding at how it runs.

We started this project by looking at Canadian symbols and why they represent us. We chose a certain symbol of Canadian Nationalism and created a presentation answering questions like “What’s the history of the symbol” “Why it’s important” and “How does it represent us as Canadians”. I enjoyed this because I like creating presentations (but not doing them). Here is what I came up with:

Then after learning about what Nationalism was through the last project we started  running a Confederation Simulation. This is what really drilled into my mind how Confederation works.

Starting this we were given these sheets of paper:

They contain information about our chosen province (Nova Scotia) that explain where our government is standing currently. It talks about things we lack and things we have abundance of, this will help us later on when making our demands. The plan for this simulation is that everyone creates some demands and then we bring them to the class in once another presentation. We then debate to see what ones will be accepted, and sometimes even make an alliance with another province. My group ended up trading iron for military power with New Brunswick and coming together with PEI to expand our fishing and ship building industries. In the end we decided if we wanted to join confederation in order to make Canada, as Nova Scotia my team said yes!

Here is our demands we came up with:

To finish up this project we made board games! I had so much fun making mine and I am very excited to show you it:

My game is based off the popular board game Snakes and Ladders, but it has a twist. This game you must answer trivia questions to get to the end. All the trivia questions are about the Canadian Confederation because that is the theme of my game. The game pieces are founding father characters which you play as while travelling through the board, as a founding father you are trying to get to the end which is completing a successful confederation. In my game I incorporated aspects of nationalism because that is the main focus of our project, and that brings us to the driving question:

What does nationalism mean for people around Canada? 

I think nationalism is very important to Canadians because it is what makes us such a strong nation. Canada prides itself in its uniqueness and multiculturalism, which has brought everyone together. Everyone in Canada has a different culture, identity, and values, but it is imprinted in us to have a strong sense of acceptance for others. Nationalism for Canadians means having respect for each other no matter who they are. Canada has made mistakes in the past but we have realized now in present day how horrible we treated some groups of people (like the indigenous peoples) and now we are trying to make up for it. Canada is very accepting and inclusive of anyone.

Thank you for reading, come try out my game!