The question of a lifetime. But you cannot simply answer this question in one sitting, oh no no no. You may ask what we are joining, what we are refusing? Well, our main goal, to get all the colonies (New Brunswick, Canada East, Canada West, P.E.I, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland) to all join together in unison and harmony, into one country that we call Canada. Now this ended all right in actual history, but in PLP 9? We had a different approach to this situation. Honestly, I think we only ended up getting two colonies to sign the Act, which brought us to the conclusion of not having confederation. If we were in the parliament, oh boy, Canada would be messed up. But lucky for you we aren’t, so here we are! 

Most blog posts you think would start out with, this is what we did, how we did it and what competencies we used. But I’m going to take a different look at this and I’m going to decided tell you about my learning. One thing I’m not going to change though is the mention of our driving question: How and why did Canada develop into a nation?

We learnt incredible amounts of knowledge, in a surprising short amount of time. Before this project, I had never used a green screen before, never edited with a green screen, never learnt so deeply about these colonies. Each and every colony was different, I was lucky enough to be part of our proudly french speaking, Canada East, which I might add had the most amount of land at the time. Just a quick flex. I was also lucky enough to get 4 other amazing girls as my group! Julia,  Kaia,  Asha, and Meg all helped each other and me to navigate our way through this problem of joining confederation. Most of this project was based around the competency ‘Evidence’. We showed this through our priliminary proposals at our first Charlottetown conference, and at our final proposals at the Quebec conference. Only one plot twist, our final proposals were required to be a commercial, explaining our conditions and demands our colony needs to join together. 

I feel I showed this competency well, because everytime we presented our proposals, we divided them up and each person got to talk about one proposal. Even though I may be assigned to talk about why Canada East should control the Election system, putting togther these proposals needed everyone’s attention and thought. I learnt so much about why the French culture was not accepted here, in colonies full of loyalists. Especially being in Canada East, we learnt not only about our representatives like George Étienne Cartier and John A Macdonald, but we learnt about making deals and treaties with other colonies, and actually interacting with other people from other colonies. Some examples may be making “imaginary” expansion plans with Canada West to take over Hudon’s Bay Company land, and making sure to “build” a railway from Toronto to Halifax, and eventually all the way to the West Coast of British Columbia! Having this interactive experience was a huge part of my learning, because not only did I get to talk with my peers from other colonies, but create an experience and gain skills like working with other even outside your group, and now getting to apply these to future projects and experiences outside school. 

Getting into the technicals, and our other competency, Create, our group actually had a first and final draft which I think was the best choice for us. Most groups created a video, and were sometimes asked to revise and just didn’t because, oh well the projects over anyways, they thought. My group knew that we could’ve done better on the editing and audio part, but our actual commercial got our message across, and it wasn’t hard to understand what our demands actually were. We were given the chance to revise if we wanted, on our editing and audio part of couse, and we took up that offer. This time we decided to switch the gears of main and supporting editor. Meg and Kaia had edited the first draft, but the final was edited my me and Asha. We made sure to get everybody’s input even if the editing style and people had changed. Our final video didn’t end up too bad, and there not many things I regret about this video. Yes some shots here and there were maybe filmed too close or too far, too long or too wide, but in the end we made it work the best we could with the knowledge and resources, and it wasn’t too shabby in the endgame. 

This blog post was also written in a different style, usually I walk through each and every step but trying something new and stepping out of your comfort zone is really what PLP is about so why not?! 

Now the moment you have all been waiting for… drumroll please…..

I will now show the final commercial video, presented by the proud women of Canada East! 

Thank you for Ms. Maxwell for putting up with us everyday of this project, we appreciate your hard work and dedication!

~Malaika