Students predicted McLeod win in mock elections
Conservatives finished after Green Party on ballots in city schools
Simon Whitehouse
Northern News Services
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Most students in the city might have been young to make a difference in Trudeaumania 2.0 this week but many have picked up the political bug and supported Michael McLeod in their own mock elections.
Many schools in the city participated in StudentVote.ca, an organization based out of Toronto that is leading about 7,000 schools across the country in conducting non-official parallel elections.
Schools register and the company sends material to them such as teaching materials, posters, ballots and ballot boxes to try and boost civic responsibility among young people.
The materials are then worked into social studies curriculum.
Involvement with the project led to William McDonald school holding a federal all-candidate's meeting earlier this month where serious questions were posed to area politicians. Dennis Bevington, NDP incumbent, Michael McLeod, Liberal elect, and John Moore, Green candidate all attended the school event earlier this month. Absent was Conservative candidate Floyd Roland.
About 180 students with staff attended the forum where students questioned candidates based on their own projects.
Leo Konge, a Grade 6 student, said he was interested in the future of small business and whether or not the country should continue to invest in the Chinese economy.
"Well, the falling Chinese economy has been a big problem especially with how our Canadian dollar just recently began going back up," he said. "So the whole thing is not very safe and we really need to know as the second biggest foreign investor in China when is enough."
Whether or not he got the responses he wanted from local politicians was another story, however.
"More or less, I suppose," he said when asked if he was content with the answers. "I definitely liked the Liberal answer which is that it is just time to stop investing in China. Because it is pretty much a dead end now.
"The Green Party was also very good because China is OK for the next three to five years but then it is just going to burst like a bubble."
Jack Kotaska, a Grade 8 student, said he is concerned about the future of sciences in Canada and was disappointed Roland wasn't present to hear his question.
"The Conservative government is currently not helping science and gagging scientists so they can't publish their work," he explained. "They're shutting down research facilities and libraries all over the country. That is not going to help us in the future without the knowledge of being able to make decisions on the global scale and national scale."
Kotaska said he was most impressed with Bevington.
Cameron Bond, student moderator, said he thought his fellow students put candidates on the spot and really made them explain their positions. Most importantly though, it was an exercise to build interest among students, he said.
"One of the reasons we were doing it is so that kids in the future will vote in the future and not start voting when they are a lot older," he said, adding that he has learned in school that the 18 to 31 year old demographic represents the smallest percentage of those voting.
Monique Marinier organized the forum and has done so in the past. She said she was taken aback at the level of sophistication among students in coming up with questions.
"I have put some together before but this one was great because of the quality of the questions that the kids came up with," she said. "There were a surprising number of students with questions - students you wouldn't expect the questions from."
