Hello, Internet,

So, we’ve been learning about Canadian history in social studies. We’ve covered quite a lot of Canadian history in the past month and a half or so, and done a variety of assignments about it. Now that we’re wrapping up the school year, however, we’ve been given an assignment to each decide which moment in Canadian history, of the ones we’ve learned about, is the greatest, and justify why.

Before I get into which moment of Canadian history I think is the greatest, I should talk about (or, rather, write about) some of the past work we’ve done in this unit.

We’ve done a couple different assignments involving writing paragraphs; one on either Jean Talon, Count Frontenac, or Francois de Laval (I chose to write about Jean Talon), and one on Durham’s Report.

We also had to create a recruitment poster for railway workers.

My favourite assignment we’ve done for this unit is the Character Card; an assignment based around creating a card about what life would be like for a theoretical person during the Cariboo Gold Rush.

I chose to do mine about a shopkeeper, because I thought it would be interesting to focus on someone who wasn’t there as a gold miner. It did end up making it more difficult to research what life would have been like, but it did end up being interesting.

We also did an assignment relating to Confederation. This assignment involved writing a speech that was either pro-confederation, anti-confederation, or pro-annexation. I ended up being assigned to write an anti-confederation speech, which I found difficult, as I disagreed with the point of view I was writing from, and I don’t feel I really ended up doing a good job writing it.

The speech I ultimately came up with is as follows:

Joining confederation now will sap us of the opportunity to be independent; the opportunity to have a government that makes decisions in our own best interests. How do we know that they will not neglect our needs in favour of those of the easterners? Is it not better to know that we must take care of ourselves? If we join confederation, we are attaching ourselves to a country that we don’t need to be a part of. We will become indebted to them; in a way, we will be controlled by them. Instead, we should go on alone, apart from Canada and their government and ideas and plans.

If we stay as an independent nation independent from Canada, we can face the events of the future in our own way, on our own terms. Less people means less conflict to worry about; we shouldn’t have to take on all of Canada’s problems alongside the problems we have ourselves. Nor should we have to ask the Canadian government to attempt to solve our problems; anything that we got ourselves into, we should get ourselves out of. That being said, we must get ourselves out of the crippling debt that we are in; if we let Canada pay it off as they have promised to do if we join confederation, then we are not out of debt, it is only in a different place. We ourselves need to be the ones who are in control of our economy, or else our economy will falter and fail.

If we do join Canada, for whatever reason, then how do we really know that they will take the time to address our needs? Canada has their own needs to take care of, and they’re sure to favour the needs of those who have been with them a long time, rather than the needs of a new group of people joining them, especially when we join them at a time when we are so in debt, and don’t seem to be in a stable state. Sure, they’ve made promises to convince us to join: money, an extension of the railroad. These aren’t promises to take care of our needs long-term, but rather terms meant to lure us in so they can have power. Canada is already a stable country without us; if we do decide to join them, we may very well end up being dependent on a government we cannot and should not depend on.

The ideal decision for us to make here is not to join confederation and take a chance on putting our valuable future in the hands of others, but rather to go forth as best we can without assistance, and form our own government. We will lead a future where we live on our own land, with our own resources, under our own government. With less people, the British Columbian government can take more time to listen to everyone, everyone’s needs can be addressed and perhaps someday everyone can be happy.

Now, as I mentioned before, I completely disagree with this view. In fact, I think Confederation was probably the greatest moment that we learned about in this unit. There are a few different reasons that I think this is the greatest moment; for one thing, it resulted in BC becoming a part of Canada, which has had a pretty positive impact on my life, not to mention countless others. For another thing, while a lot of the moments in Canadian history that we learned about seemed to involve people being pretty horrible to one another, often due to racism, Confederarion was more focussed on everyone trying to get something positive to happen.

To further *illustrate* my point, I’ve drawn a comic about why BC joining Confederarion was the greatest moment in Canadian history.

Toodles!