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October 14, 2006
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS IN OTTAWA: THE 2006 CANADA-U.S. YOUTH SUMMIT AT UO
Last spring Western Oregon University's Canadian Studies Program sponsored Laura Maddox as our representative at the 2006 Canada-U.S. Youth Summit at the University of Ottawa. Here is her account of the Summit.
This project was undertaken with the assistance of the Government of Canada / avec l'aide du gouvernement du Canada. We are grateful for the Program Enhancement Grant which made this and other Canadian Studies activities during 2005-2006 possible. Thank you!
Laura Maddox
Western Oregon University
This last spring I was given one of the most amazing opportunities of my life thus far. For one week, I spent 15 hours a day with the same 19 people, in one of the most beautiful and historically-rich cities I’ve ever seen, learning more in that one week than I would have in a year of classes dedicated to the topics we covered. I had been selected to represent Western Oregon University at the 2006 Canada-U.S. Youth Summit in Ottawa, Canada.
Ottawa is the capital of Canada, located in the province of Ontario. In the heart of the city is the beautiful campus of the University of Ottawa, which hosts the Youth Summit every year, houses the students in attendance and gives us access to classrooms and lecture halls. This year, 11 students and 7 adult and student advisors from across the United States and Canada took part in the Youth Summit, from all sorts of backgrounds and for all sorts of reasons. Some students had friends who attended in the past, others, like myself, simply heard of it from their university and were very interested in what the course had to offer. There were, (unfortunately,) only three of us from the U.S., and the other two students were from the east coast, while I did my best to represent the west. The 9 Canadian students came all the way from Alberta (western Canada,) to Quebec (far eastern Canada.) Some had been born and raised in Canada, many others were first or second generation immigrants. One was even a Canadian hockey player who has just been drafted into the U.S. National Hockey League. Another woman was one of the smartest, most enjoyable people I have ever been around. She had been a page in the House of Commons for a year, and filled us in on all of the (many) details which our Parliament Hill tour guide either left out or didn’t know of. All of the students had very different political, religious, and family backgrounds, which made them unique and intriguing to everyone else. I can’t even count the number of diverse, enlightening, and enjoyable conversations we had.
The class was divided first into four focus groups: Immigration, Corporate Governance, Trade, and Defense. Then, each of these groups was divided in two: a Canadian delegation and a U.S. delegation. (Due to the larger number of Canadian students in attendance, some Canadians were lucky enough to be designated as honorary U.S. citizens for the week.) We were able to give the professor our choices in order of preference, and I was given my first choice to be placed in the Immigration group. In my group alone, four distinct areas and languages of the world were represented. First, we had a woman who was Swiss-Canadian. She was born in Switzerland, married a Canadian, and now lives in Ottawa. She spoke German, French, Italian, and English. Another woman was from Quebec City, and had lived there all her life. She spoke French, English, and Spanish. The third woman in our group was Jordanian; her family moved to Toronto several years ago but still has a home in Amman, Jordan. Incidentally, I had traveled to Amman just the year before, and it was instant connection between us. (She had initially assumed that I didn’t even know where Jordan was, as she had obviously experienced with other people in the past.) We also shared our religious backgrounds; myself being a Christian and she a Muslim. In a world where these two religions, in particular, are struggling to figure out how to live and work together peacefully, we found it joyfully ironic that we developed the strongest bond out of everyone in the entire group.
Not all of the relationships developed in this group came easily, though. The schedule was rigorous, and the time and dedication that was required of us sometimes seemed impossible. In such a small group, living and working closely with complete strangers on a difficult joint project in a short time frame, it was only natural for tensions to run high at times, but the friendships that were made and what was accomplished in the end made it all worth it. We spent most of our days at Parliament Hill (basically the equivalent of the U.S. Capitol Hill) listening to experts on each of our four areas of research, were given a short amount of time at the end of each lecture to ask questions, and during breaks we were able to discuss the quality of the speakers and the information given which we were expected to utilize in our final policy papers. It was just so incredible to be asking experts on the front lines of all of these issues the burning questions that we couldn’t find answers to in the library or on the internet. We spoke with immigration lawyers and consultants, top corporate executives, Foreign Service officers, and former parliamentarians. We were able to not only go backstage in Parliament Hill, the Senate, and the House of Commons, but we were also given a private audience at the U.S. Embassy, a private bus tour of the city, a formal dinner at the National Library of Archives, (and even shown some of the fabulous nightlife by students from the area.) Over the course of the week, it was our responsibility to work together with the rest of the members in our group to write a 20-25 page paper proposing a policy solution to a problem discovered in our area of research relevant to Canadian-U.S. relations. We were also responsible for creating a power point presentation in conjunction with our policy proposal, which we presented on our last day, in an incredibly stunning ballroom reserved for us at Parliament Hill. We were then critiqued by some of the experts who had presented to us earlier in the week, and lastly, the students voted with their delegations to pass or fail each policy proposal. Only one of the four proposals failed, (and was, fortunately, not the Immigration group’s proposal.)
One of the neatest things to come out my experience happened months after the class was actually over. Through a conversation I had at our dinner at the National Library of Archives with Warren Creates, one of the immigration lawyers who had presented to us earlier in the week, I found out that he was actually traveling to Portland, Oregon this summer with his family. His wife was running the Hood to Coast race, and his son signed up to attend a summer snowboarding camp on Mt. Hood. Warren asked if I had any suggestions for things to see while they were in Oregon, and I mentioned that it would be fun for him and his family to join my family for dinner some night during their stay. We exchanged email addresses, and true to his word, I received an email from him a couple of months later asking about campgrounds to make reservations for their upcoming stay. His family ended up coming to have dinner at my house one night and then we were able to take them for a nice hike in the Columbia Gorge to see several waterfalls. It was especially fun to give Warren a deeper explanation of what the Canadian-U.S. Youth Summit really was all about, since he had simply been asked to speak on a panel of immigration experts for a college course focused on Canadian-U.S. relations. I was also much honored when he talked about how impressed he had been with all of the students, their interest in all of the topics being discussed, and the quality of questions being asked of the presenters. I told him I had been very impressed with the quality of the program as a whole, I am confident that I made some unexpected, lifelong friendships out of it, and through that, I took away much more than just three college credits. I can only hope that more students are able to take advantage of this incredible, truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Posted by smithr at 4:23 PM