Hope you had a fantastic time over the holidays and stayed safe. It has been strange getting an extra week off. But hopefully going back to school goes well and we all stay healthy. If you’re reading this post you probably heard about the PLP winter exhibition. Maybe you even went and checked out. Anyways it went quite well and I feel like I learned a lot.
So over the last two months we finally got to go back out on field studies. Even though they were not over night and we just remained in Vancouver it was nice to go back out of the classroom. We got to go to six super interesting places all around Vancouver. We learned quite a lot about three cultures. As well as the hardships and injustices they faced in Canadas past. As the people of China, India, and Japan arrived in Canada they were met with hostility. I was shocked to learn just how many terrible injustices these groups of people faced in the past. One injustice which truly stood out to me was the horrifying conditions Chinese Canadians were subjected to in the late 19th and early 20th century. It began with Chinese Canadians beingforced to pay a large tax in order to immigrate to Canada. Then they were forced to live in the worst areas of towns (typically swampy, industrial areas) and faced anti-asian racism. Many of them also were tricked into working on the Canadian Pacific Railway. They were promised good fortune and high wages but ended up being paid extremely low wages and were forced to do the most dangerous jobs.
This brings us to the exhibition. My group which included, Dries, Julien, and Erin was tasked with creating a memorial for the Chinese Canadians. We decided on creating a giant railroad spike. You can see a photo of the model below.
This spike would be placed in across from the Canadian Pacific Railway station in downtown Vancouver. It would be in a park surrounded my vegetation in order to increase public traffic around the spike. At the spike there would be plaques with information about the racism Chinese Canadians faced in the past. There would also be information about how that racism continues to this day. See location below.
If I was to pitch this idea to city council I would probably make some minor safety edits to the spike. As well as change the location because apparently that park will be the site of a hospital in the future. I would likely need to hire an engineer and a city planner to help find a suitable safe location for the spike. The location would also need to hold significance just as the train station did.
We chose a spike for our memorial as we wanted to create a powerful and simple visual piece which memorializes the hardships Chinese Canadians faced in the past. We wanted to show the ugly history of one of our nations greatest triumphs and most important pieces of infrastructures. Even though the railway connected our nations coasts, it drove apart our people.
We just started a new project called the Ology of Apology. With this project we are lucky enough to go on six day trips around Vancouver. You can follow these trips along in real if you go follow the @plpseycove instagram account. For our first trip we went to a Sikh temple and the Punjabi Market. At the Sikh temple we visited an exhibit dedicated to the Komagata Maru.
If you don’t know what the Komagata Maru is I would suggest watching the video below. So at the exhibit we learned about the the history of South Asians and particularly Sikhs in Canada. After this we got to experience a sliver of South Asian culture at the Punjabi market. It was really incredible to see all these stores selling traditional Indian food and goods. One thing which really stuck out to me after learning about the Komagata Maru was that the Canadian and BC governments did not offer good apologies for these events even after 100 plus years.
Apologies are really important. Especially to a community like the South Asians and particularly Indians. They weren’t allowed entry into Canada even though they were apart of the British Empire. A good apology could help spark a change and prevent anything like this from happening again. Then discovered the terrible apology the Canadian Government offered the Sikhs. Even though eventually the Canadian Government offered a better apology its still is terrible that it took them so long to do so.
Originally I had troubles relating the Komagata Maru incident to my life. I mean it was 107 years ago and didn’t affect any one of my relatives or family members. But then after the trip to the Punjabi Market I realized how it was relevant today. We need to interact with many different communities to build a complete worldview. We should never exclude a group of people due to where they came from or the colour of there skin. The Komagata Maru incident really serves as a reminder of the danger of only interacting with people who look and think the same as you. I also began to think of how my ancestors would have been some of the people in Vancouver. Hearing the White Canadian perspective about this ship and while I have no clue about what their opinions on the ship would have been. I know that if they interacted with the Indian community they would see the problem with this incident.
Memorializing people and events of the past is a great way to help those affected as well as remind the public of the importance of not repeating our past wrongs. We need memorialize the courage and bravery of these men onboard the Komagata Maru as well as the Sikh community in Vancouver. We need to document the struggle of both the individuals and the community as a whole as a reminder of our past wrongs.
After my last post where I reflected on the results of the election our class was split into different groups and we each have to make a political party. The Political Parties should be focused on solving problem we don’t think any of the current political parties solve. I’m in a group with Nate, Logan, Sophia, and Indy. We’ve named our party the Traditionalist Party of Canada. We aim primarily aim to solve income and wealth inequality while improving the Canadian economy.
This graph is a good visualization of Canadian wealth inequality.
Sounds like a big task right? While it is, there is a lot that goes into solving wealth and income inequality. First you need to understand how big the wealth gap is in Canada right now. As well as how its grown over the years. A good example of this is that Finances of the Nation suggests that the top 1% of Canadian hold 25.6% of National wealth. This is much higher then the 10% the one percent held post WWII. The wealth of the one percent seams ridiculous compared to the 4.5% of the wealth held by the bottom 50%. Covid-19 has only made wealth inequality grow. During the pandemic the wealth of the one percent of Canadian has grown by over 20 billion dollars. While the wealth of the bottom half of Canadians has slightly declined. These estimates were provided by the National Observer.
Now understanding income inequality and affordability and how it has gotten worse over time. Burying a home which was a normal and relatively easy accomplishment in the past is now incredibly difficult if your not rich. Just how much easier was it in the past? Check out this article on Seattle housing over time (even though it’s not a Canadian website it’s a near identical story across all major Canadian cities) or you keep reading this blog post. For example the median household income in BC in 1980 was $21,000 per year. That adjusted for inflation is around $67,000 per year. The average home in BC was $68,000 in 1980 that adjusted for inflation is $216,000. Now the median income a household is $90,000 per year but the median house in BC is $736,000. That means in 1980 the average house was 3.2 times the median household income but in 2021 it is 8.2 times the median household income. That is a massive difference and clearly something needs to be done to change that.
concept by money house from coins
This is where the Traditionalist Party of Canada comes in. If elected we would make housing more affordable. This would be done through lowering BC and Ontario housing prices by 35%. That might sound like a lot but that would set these housing markets back just 5 years. This would be done a number of ways, first of all we will ban all future foreign buyers from the Canadian Market. Only Canadian residents may purchase property in these places. There however would be exemptions in tourist locations such as Tofino. We will also ad a house flipping tax. It would be a large sales tax on houses which were sold within two years of being purchased. Finally we would make laws to repeal strict zoning ordnances which keep housing prices high.
In addition to making housing more affordable we will increase wages in Canada. This will be done through decreasing education costs as well as increasing high paying industries in Canada such as mining, oil and gas and tech. This will create more high paying trades jobs as these industries typically have high median wages. The median wage in all these industries is over $60,000 per year and there is many high paying six figures jobs in all these industries. Allowing these industries to flourish in Canada will help all aspects of our economy.
I hope you learned a lot about income and wealth inequality in Canada and how the Traditionalist party of Canada can fix it. To sum up the Traditionalist party of Canada. We aim to fix income and wealth inequality in Canada by modelling our economy after the successful economy throughout the 50s-80s.
With the Canadian Election Coming to a close I have been reflecting on the results. After two weeks of learning about how the Canadian government is structured and how the election process works I have some interesting ideas. These ideas have helped me better understand the democratic process in Canada. The sources I used to research statistics about proportional representation voting were fairvote and Ace Project.
My main idea is why Canada should abolish the current first past the post voting system. In order to understand why we need to change the Canadian Election System we first to understand how it works. Canada is both a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary democracy. This means that Canada elects our leaders but the Queen is our head of state. Instead of the leader who got the most votes winning the election. The leader who’s party wins the most ridings gets to lead Canada. Ridings are smaller sections of Canada. In each of these ridings we elect one MP (Member of Parliament) to the house of commons.
The 2019 election map
I believe Canada should abolish this system as it doesn’t always represent what the majority of the country wants. Canadas current system simply doesn’t respect the popular vote. I never quite realized how significant this was until I looked at this years election results. The Conservative Party won the popular vote but the liberals won 32 more seats. This seems insane to me. The Conservatives got over 200,000 more votes then the Liberals. That’s a similar population to the Kelowna metro area! This clearly shows that Canadians as a whole favoured the conservatives while certain areas, where their votes have more influence preferred the liberals. I don’t think this represents Canadas fundamental freedoms. Particularly free and fair elections and equality rights. No one person’s vote should carry more power then another’s vote. Our current elections are not completely fair. The other way this system is exploited is how parties focus on swing ridings. Swing ridings are ridings where the vote is very close between parties. Therefore parties focus more energy campaigning there in order to gain more support. Riding which are safe seats, this means that they typically elect the same party, get less focus during campaigns. This leads to these areas being under represented. Check out more information on swing ridings in Canada here.
Although it says BC on this chart Canada’s federal election tell a similar story.
If you’re wondering whether ditching this system works, it does! Many developed nations have moved onto this system and experienced many benefits. Countries which no longer use the first past the post system have 7% higher voter turnout. It also much more likely that an individual helps elect a representative. In Sweden 95% of voters help elect a representative, while in Canada just over 50% get this privilege. Abandoning this system will also force parties to collaborate with each other and pool there resources. This leads to more decisions reflecting the overall opinions of the country.
Changing the system would have so many benefits. Not only would elections be more fair, voters would be more encouraged to go out and vote. Particularly in ridings which normally vote the same party in to office. If a party gets 30% of the votes, they get to make 30% of the decisions in government. This would force parties to work together and it would help lead to better representations for all Canadians of different socio-economic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds.
I first started questioning this systems when I was looking at the student vote results. I thought the NDP had won as they had the most votes. Then one of my classmates pointed out to me that the liberals won. This shocked me as both the conservatives and NDP had more votes then them. It wasn’t a small difference, the Conservatives had 10,000 more votes then the liberals and the NDP had 35000 more votes. That is a significant difference. The student vote only involved around 800,000 students.
One of my biggest issues with our current system is how we use the first past the post vote. This simply means that only one candidate can win in each riding. It doesn’t matter how many votes the other candidates have. This leads to voter inequality. Ridings are not organized based on collective interest. In many ridings, such as my own (Burnaby-North Seymour) there is very different interests among separate areas of the riding. Burnaby and Seymour’s respective populations are quite different socio-economically. If two candidates both get a large number of votes they should be able to represent us together. I think that this would lead to more even representation.
A good example of a riding where two candidates were both popular is in the West Vancouver, Sunshine Coast and Sea to Sky Country Riding. Liberal Candidate Patrick Weiler had 19,424 votes or 33.6% of the vote. While Conservative Candidate John Weston had 17,247 votes or 30.2% of the vote. That’s a tiny difference and it is clear they are both fit to represent their people. Check out the results across different ridings in canada here.
Of course switching electoral systems would require a lot of work but I think it would make Canada a better place. Certain peoples votes shouldn’t carry more weight then others just because they live in different places. Canada needs to change electoral systems now to better represent the people living here.
It’s been awhile since my last post. No I’m not done with the blog, I have just been taking other classes. The last month has been filled with lots of learning and work. We have been studying WWI and an artifact and telling the story of these with the personal story of a soldier.
Making the final video involved a lot of time, hard work and revisions. We began with being introduced to the project and our artifacts. My artifact was the Canadian War Photos. The creation of any video has to begin with information and ideas. How do you obtain these? Through research, we used the Canadian war archives to find soldiers to add to our videos. We also took deeper dives into are artifacts. One particular activity which helped me was a video call with a curator from the Canadian War Museum named Jocelyn. After researching you must gather media such as photos, videos and audio. All photos and videos of WWI are copyright free so that was very helpful. After this we have to began creating our first draft. For me this was inputting some general photo and video clips over my first draft of my script. Finally we move into revisions. I found these very helpful as it gave me time to see what I could improve in my videos. Through both peer and teacher feedback.
My Artifact a Canadian War Photo
If you’ve watched my videos you already know about my artifact. Some key facts are that it was sent to seycove by the Canadian War Museum. It was one of 8,000 taken by professional photographers during the War. The most useful resource for learning about these was our call with Jocelyn the War Museum curator. I learned more about how the photos were acquired, as well as how they were used during the war.
If you haven’t watched my video by this point in the post I would strongly recommend it. The video provides a lot of key information needed to understand this post.
After watching my video you may be wondering why I chose my soldier. Frank Oxley Button happens to be my great-great-grandfather. All the information about him after the war came from my Grandmother and my Great aunt. They were both extremely helpful in the creation of this video and I would like to thank them. If you would like to check out Frank’s war file you can find it here.
Frank Oxley Button receiving a Certificate
Below here lies the competencies we were assessed on for this project.
Global Collaborator
This competency is all about communication. I think my best example of this competency was my final video. I feel like it used technology to communicate in a creative and meaningful way. I do feel that all video drafts helped me perfect this competency.
Establish Historical Significance
This competency was all about us exploring the historical significance of our artifacts and soldiers. These are the parts of this project I feel I demonstrated this competency the best. When I first researched our artifacts and soldiers. In addition to my screenplay.
Throughout the duration of this project I learned so much! This learning includes both skills and knowledge. Some of the areas I feel I improved the most were video skills, and an understanding of how the war shaped Canada. One area I could still work on would be my time management skill as I often find myself finishing work the night before. After taking all this into consideration I now feel prepared to answer the driving question. “How might we use artifacts and film to show the significance of WWI?” This Project taught me that by exploring past footage and photos we can discover the significance of an event. Additionally we can connect the past to the present and hopefully have a better idea of why the world is what it is today.
It’s been awhile since my last blog post. So what happened was there was Christmas break, and then we did an extra long project, it was TEN milestones in a month! This project was about nationalism during the 19th century and how that affects our lives today. We used a different example every week, on the first week we learned about various examples of nationalism around the world. I focused on American Manifest Destiny. The second week was about nationalism in British North America and the Canadian Confederation. The third and final example was Indigenous oppression in Canada. This included the Indian Act and the Story the Red River Resistance. We also made six videos during these last four weeks!
We began with our driving question “How can an understanding of nationalism help us make sense of today?” My answer to this question was “An Understanding of Nationalism in North America during the 19th century can help us understand why People express their pride in their country through sports and explorations.” I chose to focus on nationalism through sports and travel because not only are those some of my greatest interests, those our the examples of nationalism my mom can relate to the best. You might be asking why do I care if my Mom can relate to the examples of nationalism? To answer that we have to go back to the beginning of the project.
Our very first Milestone for this project was a parent video interview. We had to ask our parents questions about nationalism. Then at the end of the project we had to create a reaction video of them watching our final video. You can check out both of those videos right in this post.
One of the biggest challenges I faced in this project was the high pace of work. I play lots of sports, mostly Basketball and Skiing right now. It was a challenge to balance those with homework. It required me to manage my time. I also had to chose what was an attainable amount of work in a few days. This would often involve me cutting information as I only had time to research a few topics. The time management techniques I learned during this project will help me greatly in the future.
Editing in iMovie
My favourite video’s to make were the second video, an animatic about Manifest Destiny and the final video, the parent reaction. I enjoyed the animatic because I found the content fascinating. I have always found exploration, and industrialization super cool. In the final video I feel like I did a great job in the editing. I used some techniques which I didn’t use throughout the rest of this project. This included multiple angles inter-spliced, and a custom made intro in keynote. Go watch both of those videos, they are linked in this post.
The video I found the most challenging was the fourth video, an explainer video about oppression in Canada. I used the example of the Red River Resistance focusing on Louis Riel. I also found the editing this video in an engaging way was difficult. We never ended up finishing this video as our teacher cancelled this assignment after our rough draft. I used some of the lessons I learned from this video to improve my final nationalism video though. I would like to show the video but sadly the footage corrupted, however I still have my voiceover.
Videos are not just filming and editing though, they include a whole lot planning. We use a movie planner. We use the Know Your Story tab to began. This involves all the research and sources we will need to create our video, we also create a story mountain or story spine. Those our essentially rough plans of our video. Then we move onto a screenplay or script. Which one we use depends on the kind of video. We mostly use the Screenplay as it lets us plan the visuals as well as audio. After that we create a storyboard. Finally we move onto editing and shooting. Creating this movie planner taught me a lot of things, first off videos take a lot longer to create then you would think. For a 4 minute long video I usually spend 2-3 hours on the research, then I will spend 30 minutes on a story mountain. After that It takes me 2-3 hours to write my screenplay. Then a storyboard will take me 1 hours 30 minutes. I find this me most useless step as I generally have visualized my story during the screenplay. After all that the filming and recording will take another 1-2 hours. Then I generally spend 2 hours editing. But I’m not done yet, I still have to upload to Youtube, write a description and cite sources. That can take anywhere from 15-45 minutes. That adds up to 9 hours 15 minutes to 12 hours 45 minutes for a four minutes video! The amount of time a video takes to create shifts depending on the video, the more cuts and clips required the longer time it takes to create.
We were assessed on four competencies throughout this project. There was one Maker competency, two Social Studies and two English competencies. You might be thinking but that adds up to five, you said there was four competencies. We had one competency which spanned two subjects.
Empowered learner was our maker competency. The how might I statement which came along with it was “How might I use technology to construct knowledge.” This competency was present in all of our video milestones. My best example of this competency in my opinion was the final two videos. I feel like I used my editing to enhance the message and improve understanding of Nationalism in both of them. The multiple angles, well timed cuts and captions helped improve understanding.
The competency which spanned both English and Socials was Using Resources/ Use Evidence from various sources. The description of this competency was ‘Have I found diverse sources and evaluated them for their relevance, accuracy, and reliability? The place were this competency was most evident was my Know Your Story Tab of my movie planner. You can also find evidence of this competency in my youtube description. In three of our videos (animatic, tutorial, final video) we had to use cite everything in MLA 8 format. Most of my sources were articles. Why… well I learn the most from reading an article or book vs. watching a movie or video. I favourite websites were Canadian Encyclopedia, History.com and Britannica. I found they all had a wide selection of articles on historical nationalism. My biggest takeaways from this competency were how to cite sources even photos in MLA 8 and what sources I can use for future projects.
MLA 8 citation
Our English competency was Designing Texts. The description was “Have I used writing and design processes to plan, develop, create, and refine engaging and meaningful texts considering purpose, audience, and message? Pretty much how can I design texts (this includes video) to create a meaningful text. My greatest examples of this were once again the last two videos. I think those were my most meaningful and engaging videos. I did this through increasing the time I spent on the planning stages, particularly Know Your Story and the screenplay.
Identify Continuity and Change was our Social Studies competency. “How are lives and conditions alike over time and how have they changed?” For this example I will point to cumulative video. Throughout that video I provided examples of nationalism and life in the past and the same in modern days. My favourite example was the example of Manifest Destiny in the past and how that resulted in the frontier era compared to Manifest Destiny now and how that leads to exploration and travel. I think my example of sports was the most meaningful to my mom though.
I hope you have learned something about nationalism. I would strongly suggest checking out all the videos and film planners linked I worked very hard on them. Now you know that sports and exploration are both parts of nationalism! There probably won’t be any posts for the next couple of months, I will be taking different courses (Science and Gym) in which I don’t use the blog. Have a good day 🙂
