Sean Hruswicki
January 7th 2018
Social Studies 11
Mr. Chan
Pros and Cons of Methods of Change
What are the advantages and disadvantages of petitions, civil disobedience and pressure groups / lobbyists? Petitions are a great way of inducing change in whatever you want but, they do have some disadvantages, especially before the Internet was a thing. You need 10% of registered voters to sign your petition just for the government to acknowledge its existence and read it but, before the Internet was a thing you needed to actually go to people and they needed to physically sign it. This would be extremely difficult and time consuming. The Internet makes petitions much more efficient. The fact that people can sign petitions online can make certain petitions gain a huge amount of signatures in a short period of time. The only disadvantage to this is that people who don’t have access to the Internet can’t sign the petition and they won’t be able to make an impact in a movement they are passionate about. In the petition to extinguish GST over 150,000 of the signings were invalid, which is a disadvantage because it is almost impossible for your signature to be invalid if you were to sing a piece of paper.
The disadvantages of pressure groups / lobbyists are that lobbyists are probably only there for the money and can be super expensive, but they are a great way to pay for change. In the example of the pressure group full of CEOs, pushing for NAFTA, the CEOs were only wanting NAFTA for one reason, to make money. NAFTA was supposed to create jobs but it actually decreased the amount of jobs, but increased the amount of money the 1% were making drastically. Pressure groups and lobbyists can be abused by very rich people but it is very affective and are great when used for making good change. Pressure groups in general, formed by average people tend to not work out so well because they cannot afford lobbyists.
Civil disobedience has the greatest disadvantage of all, which is the fact that you are breaking a law. This can lead to you going to jail for a short or long amount of time. For example in the case of Viola Desmond she went to jail after refusing to leave a movie theatre when asked by police. An advantage of civil disobedience is that is makes a bigger deal than just speaking your mind. If you break the law to make a point there will be a process of you going to court, or possibly making the papers, it creates a lot of attention around the issue.