Becoming an MLA is something many young people dream of doing, but one Westlock student got to live that dream for two days last week.
Dylan Hansen, a Grade 12 student at R.F. Staples School, spent May 9-10 at the Legislature as Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock’s representative for the MLA for a Day program run by Speaker and area MLA Ken Kowalski.
The program gave Hansen a chance to meet with fellow, politically-minded students from across the province, as well as the opportunity to talk to former MLAs about their time working at the Legislature.
“It was interesting,” he said.
“We got to ask them questions about their experiences as an MLA.”
Prior to the start of the two day conference, Hansen and the other MLAs for a day were given a topic that they would be debating during the session.
The topic was whether the voting age should be lowered to 16 and whether voting should be made mandatory.
Hansen was on the opposition side of the debate, which introduced the bill, and his side also won the debate.
“So we got to debate that in the chamber and that was really neat,” he said, adding that he and his colleagues also had the opportunity to sit in the seats the MLAs occupy.
Another part of the whole experience that Hansen enjoyed was when the group got to take in a question period live in the Legislature.
He said it was an enlightening thing to witness.
“Children can behave better than some of those MLAs,” he said.
The program also included a mock election, which Hansen said was operated by Elections Canada. All the MLAs for a day were split into smaller groups and tasked with coming up with a platform for their own, small political parties.
Hansen’s group’s platform included three main tenets — education, arts and culture, and agriculture.
Again, he came out on the winning side of the vote.
Part of the program was the chance to meet with each student’s MLA, which in Hansen’s case was Kowalski.
Hansen said he got to see Kowalski’s Speaker office, as well as sit in on a meeting with Kowalski and a few members of his staff.
He was also given the chance to talk with Kowalski one-on-one.
“It was interesting,” he said. “I got a chance to ask Mr. Kowalski about things I thought were important to the farm and to the Westlock area.”
Before the two days ended, there was a dinner held with the kids and their MLAs. At the dinner, Hansen was able to sit at the head table, a perk of having the Speaker be his MLA.
On the whole, Hansen said he was very happy with the experience, and would be open to doing it again if the opportunity presented itself.
He will be attending the University of Alberta in Camrose in the fall, studying economics and political science.
He has an interest in how the world and its political systems work, he said, and hopes to get into politics in the future to help the agriculture community.
“I have a high interest in politics, based on my interest in agriculture,” he said.
“I believe in the importance of agriculture and the farmers have been kind of bent over in the past and I think that someone should give them a voice.”
