Democracy at Work - It's Your Choice
1990 · 23m · Canada
Directed by Jane Churchill
Genres: documentary
Canada's political system is explained for students, from how MPs represent citizens to how Elections Canada runs voting, tracing the extension of the franchise.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A civics primer dressed up as documentary—exactly the kind of institutional whitewashing that makes me want to scream. There's not a single moment of friction, doubt, or the messy reality of how power actually works; it's just smiling bureaucrats explaining the system they've already won.
Churchill's film sits squarely in the tradition of public broadcasting education documentary, executed with the formal clarity and earnest craft you'd expect from the NFB in this era—the kind of institutionally-sanctioned work that establishes how a nation wants to see itself, and that historical positioning is precisely what makes it worth preserving and studying.
The choice to anchor this around the *extension* of the franchise rather than its current mechanics suggests a deliberate editorial decision to frame democracy as progressive motion, and that framing—whether you buy it or not—is doing all the interpretive work the film needs to do.