For today’s post I am going through my latest project which has been based around the question “ how should we govern ourselves”. In order to answer this question I needed to know what it would be like to govern ourselves, so my group (Thomas , Asha , Angelo, Kaden ) and myself created our own party running for government ( fake of course) along with a campaign ad. Here is how it went and what I learned  about government and what it takes to run one.

Of course in order to decided how we should govern ourselves we have to first understand how we are currently being governed, what works about it, and what we think we could change to better suit Canadians. We learned all about the government and how it is structured into different levels to in order to deal with issues that arise at federal, provincial and municipal level. My biggest take away that would help me throughout this project was that I found our government is way to complicated, and this lead me onto many different ideas of ways we could change up our government. If you want to hear my whole idea about government then make sure to check out this post on how I viewed our Canadian government and what I think could change. 

Before I get to the point where my group and I start to create our party there is one more activity we did that helped me prepare for our final project which of course was our campaign video. Our teachers had us look at the campaign and attack ads for the parties currently running for government. After having a look at all of them I realized they all follow a similar pattern and depending on what type of audience they are appealing to they alter slightly. Most ads will there leader as a guide for the video accompanied by video and text to help them get their message across. As we learned in class as well each party has a certain area on the political scale in which they are trying to hit or persuade, and it was evident in their ads where that was based on what they promised if they get elected. 

I would say the biggest take away from those videos was how the leaders conveyed their message, and by that I mean how their worded their promises. “ The art of advertising is about telling the truth in the most compelling way possible” which is something a CTV critic said about some of the campaign ads which I thought was something I needed to carry into my own campaign video.

Now we reach the part where my group has come together to form our own party, and by this point I was getting a little tired of politics, but I knew that I had to keep myself engaged, so I decided to create a whole new system of how elections in Canada are run. This really kept me going when we were creating our own parties. I had a lot of fun creating a system and then revising to see if I could create something that actually worked. My group helped me as well and together we gave our party a unique twist. If you want to read more about the system I created along with what our group decided to change if we were elected then make sure to check out this post. 

The last part I will talk about was actually making the campaign video. This part was ok, but it showed me that trying to explain ideas within a limited amount of time is really difficult. If I had been given more time I know there would be lots of things I would change. I think for me it was somewhat frustrating in the end because I wasn’t able to explain everything that my groups party wanted to do, but at least I know for future projects how important it is to plan out our most important ideas and really focus all of our time around explaining those.

So to answer the question “how should we govern ourselves” here is what I have say. We should govern ourselves in a simple way in which all Canadians values are best represented in our government, but also in the decision they make.

Overall from this project I took away important bits of information like being resourceful with your time, concentrating on main ideas and really going deep into those concepts, and also having fun with your work and trying to incorporate into the message you are trying to convey. For next time I think if I can keep on weaving in my own ideas through media creation or whatever else then I’ll be more engaged and probably more likely to create better work.

That’s all for now.