The goal of this project was to understand how Canadians are viewed by the countries around us and how to beat the general stereotypes of Canadian life.

Important Starting Information 

We started or by learning about Canada and how the laws here are created following the Charter of Rights.

The Charter rights protects different rights and freedoms. Some of the rights and freedoms are..

Fundamental Freedoms 

Main Points 

– Everyone in Canada is free to practise and religion or none 

– We are allowed to express are religion in private and public 

– We are allowed to speak our minds, and listen to opposing view (this doesn’t include hate crime and threats of violence) 

– We’re allowed to protest against a government action or institution

As you can see the charter rights are basically the laws of Canada in the simplest forms. The basic human rights that the Supreme Court of Canada believes should be enforced. 

Canadian Identitiy through Economy 

Each person in my class had to chose a topic that related to our Canadian Identity, we then had to become an expert on our topic. The topic that I chose was economy. I wrote about how the economy of Canada is effected by our geography and how our Canadian identity is effected by our economy. After we were done becoming experts on our topic we had group discussions. The first discussion we had was with people who has similar topics to ours. The topics in our group were Economy (mine), Hockey, Air Canada and Tourism. In this group we easily found similarities and had an easy conversation. Then we had a conversation in groups with topics completely different to ours. In my different goroup the topics were, Economy (mine), Chinese immigrants, Canadian Actors and Animals. This conversation was harder to talk about similarities, but it seemed to flow smoother because everybody had a lot of different points to bring up. In the elevator pitch that I presented I briefly described my topic. Here is my elevator pitch… 

How does the Canadian economy support Canadian identity?

Considering how small our population is Canada has one of the strongest economies in the world, in 9th place as of 2023, just behind France and the UK. The reason Canada has a strong economy is that it has many natural resources including minerals from the Canadian Shield, timber from British Columbia, fish from the Atlantic region, wheat and grains from the prairies and oil and gas from Alberta. The three largest/most profitable industries in Canada are commercial banking, primary care/doctors and apartment rental . Commerical Banking is controlled mainly by interest rates, Health care is effected by population growth from immigrants and the increase of rental demand is supporting growth in the rental market. Some benefits of having a large economy are that many Canadians have good job opportunities, generating higher tax revenues allowing the government to spend more money on publicly funded services like free health care and widespread education. An additional benefit of a strong economy is a higher average income allowing more Canadians to keep up with inflation. Our economy supports the idea that Canada is a prosperous country, that is safe and enjoyable to live in. 

Human Library

For the final part of this project we hosted a Human Library at our school. You might be wondering “What is a Human Library?”. A human library is a safe space where people who have lived different experices to ours have the chance to share their story. Instead of borrowing a book, you would borrow a conversation from someone. A human library is a place where you can ask people questions that you would not get to normally ask them in public. 

Our human Library 

In our human library each person from our class invited 1-3 people. In total 18 people/books were able to show up. We had many guests about 5 people talked to each book. I ended up talking to 3 books. All the books had exccedingly different stories. One person I talked to was a surgeon who immigrated from England to B.C., the second person I talked to was an engineer who constructed contraptions for disabled people in his free time (if you want to learn more about what he does you can visit this website https://tetrasociety.org/) and finally I talked to a lawyer who immigrated from Equador to Canada. I personally think our human library was very successful, I got to talk to so many people with interesting stories about their lives. 

Overall I actually enjoyed this project a lot. My favorite part of this project was the Human Library. It went a lot better than how I thought it would and I greatly enjoyed hearing all the cool stories. My least favorite part of this project was when we had the group conversations because I struggled to come up with good questions to ask. But  I learned a lot and had fun during this project. Thanks for reading my post and have a great day!