It has been a big couple of months in Canadian politics. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called an early election during a pandemic, which was an extremely unpopular idea for a number of reasons. It would cost a lot of money to run an election, it would force people to group together during a pandemic, and it was a poor decision by the Liberals as it seems like they are taking advantage of the pandemic. With such an interesting and controversial decision by the government, many opinions were formed by many different people including myself. So what are these opinions? How should we govern ourselves?
In my opinion, Canada has a pretty good form of government. I think that a representative democracy is a healthy and good plan in practice, but I think that the way Canada’s electoral system is formed has some major flaws. My biggest issue with the Canadian government is that the citizens don’t get to directly choose who our prime minister is. I write about this in an earlier blog post, but Canadian votes should not be put towards a representative AND a Prime Minister. The idea in a representative democracy is that citizens are voting for a Member of Parliament to represent their riding in the House of Commons. Their vote should not also indirectly choose their Prime Minister.
This form of voting is seen in other countries around the world. New Zealand has a similar voting system that replaced the first past the post system Canada uses. Called a mixed-member proportional system, citizens get one vote for a representative and another vote for the ranked party lists. This form of voting allows citizens to elect who they want in government.
It turns out that this idea was not uncommon among my classmates. Many other students in my class had similar ideas in that the Canadian electoral system was flawed. Of course in a democracy, what happens when a group of people have similar political ideas? They make a political party. Well guess what: that is exactly what we did.
Rhiann, Zoe, Izzy, Natalie, and myself “created” the Revise and Reform Party (R&R) because we collectively believe that Canadian voters are not being properly represented. Together we created our party platform and our press release to present our party to the world. The R&R party’s biggest issue was the election system that Canada used. If you want to learn more about what our party’s values, ideas, and plans if elected were go check out my post about it.
Once we had a party platform, we began to work on our first video to the public, explaining who we were and why you should vote for us. This video was the video that you saw at the top of this blog post and if you watched it you probably noticed something about the way the video was portrayed. Now my group made a unique decision with our video, in that we would target our video towards a younger audience. We decided our video would be more lighthearted and funny, rather than the boring and repetitive nature of the political videos today. Now i don’t know your opinions on it but personally, I think that the idea was great except we didn’t do too well on the execution. There are a lot of things we could have done to improve that video, but I think the biggest one was just planning our time a little bit better.
Still, I am proud of my group and what we managed to achieve. I think that most of the issues with the video were purely technical, and that we successfully managed to create a political party with unique, reasonable, and achievable ideas.
This was an interesting project for me. I haven’t thought about my political opinions that much in the past, but I’m almost 18. Unless Trudeau doesn’t call another crazy election, I will be voting in the next election. This project almost forced me to learn about my own political beliefs because if I didn’t know what I wanted how was I to make a political party with others? If I didn’t know what I wanted in a government it would be pretty difficult to collaborate with others and create our own party.
I really enjoyed this project. The driving question really got me thinking about what my own political views were but also how political parties position and sell their own political views. For example, the Conservatives are slowly becoming more socialist, and so now we have the People’s Party of Canada, a party that is selling themselves as the real conservative party of Canada. In a way it reminds me of a project I did in grade 8, which was a project about advertising. Now with that project we were focusing on poster advertisements but the same tactics can be used in political videos. Positioning, what you say/write, and what your visuals are showing can have a massive impact on how the public views you.
A lot of my class felt that the Liberal ad above was empty and didn’t have any real message behind it, all because of an advertising choice by the Liberal Party. Before this project I used to think that political ads were of pointless, and a slight waste of money. But this project helped me realize that the public opinion can be shifted and changed with the smallest mistake or risk during a political campaign.