Conscription is Not Fair! Conscription is Not Fair!
Conscription is Not Fair! This line still rings in my head as I am writing this two week after the exhibition. Why is conscription not fair? Well this is the question my group answered and portrayed at this immersive flight exhibition. Our assignment was to create an immersive walk through experience with the topic of conscription in Canada during 1917. The conscription forced men in Canada to go to war if they could fight, even against their will. This created some problems though as many Canadians didn’t want to fight in the war especially the French Canadians. The French Canadians didn’t feel French or British but Québécois. The Québécois felt they had nothing to do with the war as they didn’t feel connected to France or England leading them to prominent protests. The French protest is what we made the bread and butter of our experience as it was easy to represent and gave a little pop to our project. We used the protest as a climax to our story and built everything else around that.
First we had Matthew our Canadian sergeant and our two Québécois engage in some heated banter. We made sure we established the major point that no one wanted join the war because it was dangerous and that the Québécois really didn’t want to join the war and all they had to do was say no.
Second we had my part which was a political speech which demonstrated the unrest within the Québécois people as Borden made enlistment mandatory. This lead to a semi engaged protesters protesting against conscription.
Next we had Anatolia describe the roles women had in this debacle and show how Borden leveraged the new found women vote to get conscription past.
Our final piece of our emersive experience ended where it started with Matthew getting people to join the war and now with conscription passed the people had no choice but to join the war. But once again Matthew is foiled by the sly Québécois as Cashel and Zak explain the large loop hole that allowed around 80% of men to be exempt of the war because of occupation or religious belief.
Overall I think our exhibition went well as we were able to tell the not so interesting story of conscription in a more interesting way. Our group was able to keep the audience engaged and having both Cashel and Zak as narrators/tour guides really helped keep the story as one piece instead individual sections. We could of improved on our scenery a bit, but other than that everything went as well or better than I thought.