They will not be voting for another 6 years, but Humboldt Public School teacher Jackie Bay says her students are ready for it.
They participated in a mock vote on Oct. 14 before the federal election took place. Thanks to all the research they did before hand, most of her kids now know how they’d vote if they were of voting age.
“Some of them will admit they went into this with a closed mind, ‘I don’t want to talk about the government,’ but in the end they took the election seriously and are willing to talk about it.”
Bay says the point was to get her students more active and she saw that by the end of the section.
“They’re 12-years-old...but the level of knowledge and language these guys have (is) because they did that research and they invested that time and effort.”
Kids in Grade 7 and 8 learned about the political process, as well as the different candidates, parties and leaders.
One of the kids commented to Bay that now she’d know what to do if she had to vote tomorrow.
Teijon says that learning about the process tells them what Canadians want and what their school wants.
“It’s important because we’re going to need to do it in 6 years...if someone doesn’t want to take participation in it, that’s their choice.”
Just getting the experience was important, says Teijon.
Brooke thought it was really cool to have the opportunity to vote it gave them the experience for when they do get the chance.
They did not have the choice of not voting, says Jayna, which was why it was important that they did their research.
The results were a Conservative majority in the realm of Humboldt Public School 7 and 8 classes. The NDP would have made up the opposition.
The class says that this means they are in favour of keeping taxes the same and keeping the current laws.
Decisions would be made pretty easy, they said when it comes to the Conservatives having a majority in their classroom. In reality, it’s going to be easy for the Liberals to make decisions with their majority.
Watching the election results, it showed that people wanted change, says Brett, especially with 33 seats in the maritimes right off the bat.
“Maybe Justin Trudeau is ready because he makes public apperances. Harper, they had to pay a lot of money to get a public apperance (from him).”
Students saw a need for change. Bay told them about seeing signs on a lawn for Liberal, NDP and Green but nothing for Conservative.
Bay is extremely impressed with her class, especially with some of them going home and having a conversation with their parents about voting.
Teijon tried to get the conversation started with his brother but his brother just did not care about who won.
Many students said now they do care about politics and what happens.
“When we started this, I was like, ‘I don’t want to do politics, I don’t care about politics.” says Emma. “And by the end of it, I was very interested, I wanted to know what the results would be and who was going to win.”
The day of the election, Bay says her students were pumped for their chance to cast their vote.”
Bay says she does not think her students realize how much more power they have because they now have this knowledge.
Emma says people should do their research before saying they are not going to vote.
“If I didn’t know about it and I wanted to know about it, I’d have done research.”
