“How Should We Govern Ourselves?”

This, the driving question of my latest PLP project. During this project we learned about ideology, Canadian government structure, and about political strategy in general and we were tasked with creating our own unique political party that could run in Canadian elections, the Zettlekasten system used to take notes and store our research. I’d like to point out that I feel that this driving question was a huge question to ask a bunch of 16 and 17 year olds that mostly knew nothing really substantial about politics, but this was definitely a double edged sword as I feel that everyone learned a lot (or at least had the opportunity) yet I don’t feel any closer to an objective answer to that question. Of course though, my group (Jordyn,
Meg, Liam, Alex V) and I came up with our subjectively true answer, The Ubiquitous Party of Canada was formed, we aimed to take what we deemed to be the best qualities of different ideologies and form into one kind of like a meta-centrism. Here’s our statement of intent.

And here’s why you should vote for us (if we were real), this also shows some of our answer for “How Should We Govern Ourselves?”

And here is a link to a blog post that goes more in depth on some of our ideals and platforms.

I think that has been one of my favourite PLP projects I’ve ever done, I think it had the potential to be the favourites of a lot of students too, but I think that the entire project fell short for our group because we were all looking for the right answer, while also being aware that there isn’t. Secondly I don’t think the mix of grade 11s and Grade 12s has meshed that well this year, yet. All of this disappoints me because I think this project had more potential than was realized by everyone, including myself. It was also really hard to differentiate our parties from pre existing parties in Canada. Generally, it was the structure of this project that challenged me the most, my mistake was that I tried to work around it, instead of simply through it. Our own answer disappoints me though, it was what we as a group wanted, but not what I, as an individual wanted, perhaps this is the downfall of democracy, or perhaps it is the biggest strength. Either way I wish we had more time to critically analyze how and why, we should govern ourselves.

My heart was really into this project, I really do think we made a killer final video, our points were thought out well and there are very few things I would change (for once, most of those things I would change weren’t done by me which is cool) but I fell short in the stepping stones, not due to lack of effort this time, but due to a lack of direction. I felt that I didn’t really know where to go with my Zettlekatsen, and I should’ve, the tools were there for me, I just started building the wrong thing, I don’t think that means I’m necessarily a bad builder, though. Lastly, my blog posts have been quite lacklustre this project. I want to get into the habit of polishing these up more, not particularly for the grade, but for me. 

Thank you.