The Experiment
What if democracy didn't require political parties?
What if governance focused on problems instead of promises?
What if the four-year electoral cycle—with its predictable pattern of campaigns, compromises, and disappointments—wasn't the only way?
Ducklings is CanuckDUCK's attempt to find out. And it's already running.
What We're Actually Building
Ducklings is a fiscal governance platform for Canadian high school students (Grades 9–12). But calling it a "simulation" undersells it.
We're prototyping a different kind of democracy—one without parties, without left or right, without tribal loyalty tests. Just problems, constraints, and the uncomfortable math of tradeoffs.
Students don't campaign on what they wish government could do. They work within what the budget actually allows.
If this sounds like how governance should work—that's the point.
Currently Live
Six Alberta School Divisions. Sixty-One Schools.
Division
Schools Registered
Calgary School Division
22
Edmonton School Division
10
Calgary Catholic School Division
9
Rocky View School Division
9
Edmonton Catholic School Division
8
Peace River School Division
3
This isn't a pilot program with a handful of test users. This is infrastructure ready for province-wide participation.
How It Works
The Governance Hierarchy
Ducklings mirrors Canadian federalism. Proposals flow upward:
Students/Teams (Classroom)
↓
School
↓
School District
↓
Provincial
↓
National Governance
Every participating school submits budget proposals. These aggregate through districts, roll up provincially, and ultimately converge at the national level—where collective decisions shape simulated fiscal policy.
Real Complexity: 214+ Budget Decisions
This isn't a simplified worksheet. Students face over 214 distinct budget allocation decisions across government departments and programs.
Going solo? You can—but as the platform warns:
"You can participate without a team, but you'll handle all 214+ budget decisions yourself."
The complexity is deliberate. Real governance can't be managed by individuals. You need teams, delegation, trust, and coalition-building.
The Student Experience
Onboarding: Know Thyself First
Before touching a budget, students build their civic profile:
- Community Type: Large city (500,000+), small town, rural—where you're from shapes what you prioritize
- Decision Style: Fiscally conservative, progressive, balanced ("It depends on the situation")
- Spending Preference: Scale of 1–10, from minimal government to expansive programs
- Top Concerns: Students rank their priorities—cost of living, clean energy transition, mental health services, hospital wait times, post-secondary affordability
Why? Because Ducklings isn't about finding the "right" answer. It's about understanding how values shape policy choices—and how people with different values can still find workable compromises.
The Dashboard
Once enrolled, students access:
- My Team: Form or join teams of up to 5 members
- Governance Dashboard: Track active proposals, floor votes, passed legislation, and cumulative budget impact
- My Profile: View progress, badges, and civic engagement history
- Glossary: Because fiscal policy has terminology worth learning
- My Merge Requests: Collaborative proposal workflow (yes, like Git)
Progression: Duckling to Adult Duck
Students start as "Ducklings" and progress through experience levels based on completed governance cycles. Four cycles to reach "Adult Duck" status.
This isn't gamification for its own sake. It's tracking genuine civic engagement depth. A student who has navigated multiple budget cycles, weathered simulated crises, and collaborated across schools has earned their progression.
The Technical Foundation
Every Decision on the Blockchain
Each school receives a unique CanuckDUCK ID (CDKID) and a Hedera account. Each registered student gets their own Hedera account.
Why blockchain? Because democratic records should be immutable and auditable. When Student 01234 from Sir Winston Churchill High School votes on a proposal, that vote is recorded permanently. No one—not even us—can alter the historical record.
This isn't crypto speculation. It's democratic infrastructure with receipts.
Privacy by Design
Schools manage their own students. We store only:
- Student ID number (assigned by the school)
- Student password
- Hedera account address
No names. No emails. No personal information. The privacy notice is explicit:
"Only student ID numbers are stored. No names or personal information."
Schools maintain the student ↔ ID mapping internally. We never see it.
The Causal Network
Behind the governance dashboard lies the Causal Network—our model of how policy decisions cascade through interconnected systems.
Cut provincial transfers to municipalities? The model traces consequences: deferred maintenance → infrastructure decay → reduced tourism revenue or transportation disruptions → downstream budget pressures for future cohorts.
A fire in Red Deer that isolates Calgary from Edmonton. A bridge rated "poor condition" that constrains planning. These aren't random events—they're logical consequences of accumulated decisions.
Weekly Epochs, Semester Cycles
Synchronous Operation
All schools operate simultaneously on 1-week epoch cycles within semester-long campaigns. This architecture enables cross-timezone participation: a class in St. John's and a class in Victoria can engage in the same governance simulation.
Week 5: The Crisis
Every semester, at Week 5, we inject an unforeseen crisis—natural disaster, economic shock, infrastructure failure, federal policy change.
Students discover what every real government learns: budgets built without contingency shatter on contact with reality.
Cross-Semester Inheritance
Decisions don't reset. They cascade.
Next semester's students inherit the fiscal legacy of their predecessors—the deferred maintenance, the accumulated debt, the infrastructure rated "poor." They learn that governance isn't about their semester alone. It's about the long arc of consequences.
The Tribunal
At the national governance level, we convene a multi-model AI deliberative panel.
The Process
Phase
Description
Pass 1 (Blind)
Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT independently analyze collective proposals and predict outcomes. None see each other's work.
Pass 2 (Cross-Reference)
Each model receives the other two summaries and refines its analysis.
Synthesis
A designated AI produces the final outcome document.
What It Does—and Doesn't Do
The Tribunal analyzes and predicts. It does not decide policy. It does not engineer outcomes. It examines what students across the country have collectively proposed and offers reasoned analysis of likely consequences.
Three models, three different reasoning architectures, three sets of potential blind spots. The disagreements between them are themselves educational: even sophisticated AI systems don't agree on predictions. Certainty is often false confidence.
Limited by Design
Tribunal sessions use extended "thinking" mode on all three models—deep reasoning with real computational cost. This isn't deployed casually. It's reserved for significant national-level proposals that merit the investment.
The constraint teaches resource allocation: serious deliberation is expensive.
Equity by Architecture
Here's where Ducklings gets radical.
Calgary School Division has 22 schools, substantial resources, and established infrastructure. Peace River has 3 schools in communities most Albertans couldn't find on a map.
This is a feature.
We want well-funded urban districts debating fiscal policy alongside underfunded rural schools. We want ideas competing on merit, not resources.
Pricing Reflects This
We don't charge flat rates. Calgary pays more than Peace River. Significantly more.
If a small rural district can't afford participation, we'll give them a seat anyway—pro bono if necessary.
The entire experiment fails if we exclude voices because they can't pay. Democracy that prices out the margins isn't democracy.
What Ducklings Teaches
Lesson
Mechanism
Fiscal Literacy
214+ real budget decisions with actual government data
Post-Partisan Thinking
No parties—just problems and proposals
Systems Awareness
Causal Network models cascading consequences
Collaborative Governance
Team-based complexity, merge request workflows
Crisis Management
Week 5 disaster injection
Democratic Accountability
Blockchain-recorded decisions with permanent audit trail
Epistemic Humility
Tribunal disagreements reveal uncertainty
The Bigger Vision
Can Canadians govern through issues instead of parties? Can direct democracy at granular levels reduce bureaucratic friction? Can we break the four-year cycle of promises and disappointments?
We don't know yet. That's why it's an experiment.
But if high school students in Peace River and Calgary can find common ground on fiscal policy through respectful discourse and shared constraints—maybe adults can too.
Ducklings is the training ground. Learn to govern here—with respect, with data, with accountability—before swimming in the deeper waters of Pond.
For Educators
Interested in bringing Ducklings to your school or district?
Pricing scales with capacity. Large urban districts subsidize smaller rural ones. If budget is a barrier, contact us anyway—we'd rather have you at the table.