Analysis of the motions that were debated at British Parliamentary Provincials
By: Kevin Chen
On October 29th and October 30th, 2022, the British Parliamentary Provincial Debate Tournament took place online.
The Woodstock interviewed Woodlands debaters about their thoughts on the motions.
In Round One, the motion was: This House regrets the rise of the social media influencer.
Sophie Zhang and Suri Sun were Closing Government. They ran “the idea that social media companies are still companies, meaning they're profit driven. How they get that profit is from advertising, however, the core idea of any kind of marketing is to give you something you don't have. In the west where social media is prevalent, we have generally most needs met, meaning they then create [an] artificial need so they can make money. This means social media influencers who further propagate these ads will always be promoting harmful narratives that people aren't good enough or that there is always better in order to sell products because that's their job (i.e beauty influencers).”
The Round Two motion was: This House Would require the resignation of a Prime Minister or Premier to automatically trigger an election.
Sophie Zhang and Suri Sun were Closing Government in Round Two. They ran a principle on democracy and a sub-point on perception of upholding democracy. Sophie Zhang explains: “[The] principle is you get more democracy when you get the election. You want people to be democratic because you are a democratic state. On the idea of perception, we say that even if we don’t get the principle of democracy, to the extent that at least people feel like they voted and feel like they had a democracy, it’s going to be better for national unity and perception of democracy.”
Crystal Zhang talked about Round Three. “We were CG [Closing Government] for the motion This House supports permanent funding of space exploration and the study of astronomy as a social good for all of humanity. We argued about mitigating extinction risks such as asteroid collisions, capacity for research, and won on [the criteria of] scope of impact and knowledge expansion.”
In Round Four, the motion was: Assuming you had the technology, This House Would financially reward citizens for good deeds. Joy Luo and Amy Liu got first place in Round Four as Closing Government. Joy Luo said: “Essentially when you have the incentive to do good, the people who want this incentive are those who require the money. And that has the most impact on their lives because often, the ability to do good inherently comes with privilege. For example, you can’t do good if you don’t have the ability to take care of yourself first. So we ran how it allows people to have more privilege to do good.”
Those less fortunate often do not have the monetary ability to help others, as they need to help themselves. So providing money for good deeds results in people being able to carry them out, increasing the amount of good deeds.
Suri Sun was on Opening Opposition in Round Four. She said: “The correct opp [opposition] case was so clear to me that running it was super satisfying. What I perceived to be the most strategic opposition case was that incentive to do good exists on both sides of the house but on gov [government] there exists a perverse incentive. You could bring up the cobra effect where if you offer a tangible incentive to do something ‘good’, people are more likely to cause problems in order to create a bigger market to do good. Like if you put a bounty on cobras, people are going to start breeding cobras in their basements in order to kill them and get more money as opposed to actually decreasing the cobra population by killing them in their natural habitats.”
The motion for Round Five was: This House believes that shrinking cities should be allowed to impose an "exit tax" on businesses who leave. An info slide was provided: A shrinking city refers to a city that is drastically losing population. This can happen due to environmental factors, losing employment, cost of living, or economic change. Examples of shrinking cities include Detroit, Michigan, Rome, Italy, and many Eastern European cities.
Sophie Zhang said: “For Round Five, we were [on] Opening Government. The entire thing is why an exit tax benefits the economy of the shrinking city. Big corporations are more incentivized to stay [because they do not want to pay the exit tax] and they have the resources to make the city prosperous/revitalize the local economy.”
Suri Sun explained why the shrinking cities motion was her favourite: “It was definitely a breath of fresh air because I think it required more world building, especially as a policy motion, like defining what the policy exactly would look like. And I think that was more interesting to me than the shallow social media influencers motion.”
British Parliamentary Provincials had a lot of interesting debates. The debaters all performed very well and showcased their excellent debating skills.
For a more general overview of the tournament, take a look at the following article, also by The Woodstock: British Parliamentary Provincials
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