Our first project of this year was about politics and how governments works, specifically the Canadian government because Canada had just held a federal election. This project was based off the driving question: How should we govern our selves?

After a refresher on how our government works and the roles and systems within it, as well as some deeper research into topics of our choice, mine being electoral systems, we wrote a blog post. It reflected on the election and as per our driving question we shared our thoughts on something we would change about it. I focused on changing our electoral system from “first past the post” to Proportional Representation which you can read more about it in my Election Refection post

To answer the driving question: How should we govern our selves? We were going to create our own political party that’s ideals and policies would answer that. The first step for this was to find a group of like minded people, my group was Kaia, Ciara, Emily and myself. We then created our statement of intent which would outline our party ideals, policies, what makes us unique, and why you should vote for us. We went about this by brain storming what we wanted to see in our government then comparing our thoughts and started to come up with ideas for a political party that would be able to achieve that.

In short we came up with a party that we named the Egalitarian Party of Canada. The party is a fairly liberal leaning party focused on bringing Canadians together through equality and diversity. Our priorities being: changing the electoral system to a Proportional Representation system, ensuring diversity in all governmental institutions by providing the necessary tools to those individuals, and allowing the more wealthy the chance to give of their own free will instead of taxing it out of them.

Our final task for this project was to create a campaign video. One of the challenges with making this video was in where most of the big parties that have been around for a long time can mostly rely on people pre-existing knowledge of the party and generally what it stands for so that in a campaign ad they can just focus on their policies. Our party was brand new so no one had any pre-existing knowledge about it or know what it stands for so our video had to not only be a campaign ad but also a party ad.

After a short time of brainstorming we decided that one of the key components we wanted our video to have was interviews from a varity of different people explaining what they wanted to see in their government, we would then offer the solutions our party had to those issues and how we would go about solving them. Filming these interviews was a very fun new experience because I got to properly light the set and do all the technical camera and audio things. Which I was used to coming from Still Photography but it was a good experience being able to apply those skills to a new medium that I don’t usually work with.

Unfortunately I got sick after we filmed the interviews I did not get to finish filming the video with my group in person. My group did a great job filming the rest of it and I think the final party ad turn out great.

In conclusion I think this project was a lot of fun and a great way to get us involved in politics. It not only showed us the political side but also the governmental systems and how those two interact. As well as giving us initiative to make our own changes, as the old saying goes: “If you want something done right you have to do it yourself”