Hey guys welcome to the newest blog post. We’re still on this same politics project, but now I’ve got a group and a party!! It’s made up of me, Julia, Gabe, Anders, and Matthew, and our party is the Future Party Of Canada (it’s a name in progress). But we’ve just developed our mission statement if you will, which talks all about us as a party. I’ll be explaining in as best as I can in this post but as a little example here’s the liberal party’s mission statement. 

When we were thinking up our party, our big seller (or unique point) was to focus on the long term future, like we’re talking 50-100 years. My group had some big disagreements at the start of this project, and this was the one idea that didn’t involve kicking someone out. One of the main ideas for this project was to really come up with an idea for a party that was unique and this was our main focus. Our priorities for this party were the merging of the economy and the environment. Although I’m not able to discuss specific platform points at the moment, our big ideas were to phase out oil, and focus on renewable energy and innovation.

But the other big thing that Ms. Willemse wanted us to talk about was how we would actually change how Canada governs itself. Our driving question for this project is “How should we govern ourselves?” And our parties are supposed to have the solution to that question. We decided that we would change how ministers are elected modelling off of Italy which elects a set of people into office call technocrats which are people with technical experience instead of simply political experience, and we chose voting style similar to the US where their names are included on the federal ballots. We also want to shift certain government responsibilities particularly certain resource management out of the hands of the provincial and municipal governments to the federal government, allowing for a quicker decision making and bigger projects being pushed forward.

You’d honestly be surprised how hard it is to create a political party, especially in terms of trying to agree with others. I’ve really not been around for long, but I’m still shocked about how much people disagree. And it’s still always heartbreaking when people don’t instantly agree with your ideas. It is SO easy to critique the government and disagree with political parties, but my group of 5 could barely agree on a basic philosophy, I do not envy those trying to manage an entire party, and especially those who try to get things done by using their party in government. Needless to say I’m a hypocrite just by saying that as I have definitely criticized Canada’s parties before, but just maybe in the future I’ll feel just a little bit bad as I criticize.

I believe my party has a strong message and clear goal which is hard to come by. Although I would say our platform and possibly party might be a tad too specific at the moment, Canada’s future is incredibly important to not only me but the people who live here, and our parties priorities, mission, and values are all about preparing Canada for the future, and the changes in the world that I’m sure are yet to come.

Thanks as always,

Holly