Gorilla Radio blog: ShitHarperDid Media Counter-Offensive

Thursday, June 26, 2014

ShitHarperDid Media Counter-Offensive

I Lost My Job, So I Did This

by Shane - ShitHarperDid

I started volunteering with ShitHarperDid in 2011, appearing in our very first video that went viral during the election. Today I’m happy to share a very exciting new project with you. I think you will really enjoy it.

Two and a half years ago I said goodbye to my precarious job as a mental health worker and returned to college - at the ripe age of 32 - in pursuit of employment that would be more stable. After graduating from my Interactive Media and Design program with Honours, I secured a few wonderful references from my professors and I really thought to myself: “This is it! This is the first day of the rest of my life...”

I packed up and moved to Toronto to be closer to my family (and my favorite baseball team!). I was full of knowledge and drive and ready to do whatever was necessary to find a job that made use of my new degree.

But all I have found is unemployment, precarious work, unpaid internships and more unemployment. I’m not alone, unemployment for people under 35 in Canada is nearly double the national average.1 On top of that, as a person of colour I’m part of a population that still struggles for equal pay.
*For every dollar earned by white Canadians, racialized Canadian workers earn only 81.4 cents.2*

The Conservative Economic Action Plan has done nothing to address this sort of injustice. Instead, it’s only made things worse. Canada’s 86 richest Canadians now have as much money as the 11.4 million poorest people.3 That’s just straight up unacceptable. Yet, instead of dealing with these systemic problems, the Conservatives just bombard us with Economic Action Plan ads meant to convince the public that everything is great.

But we’ve found their Achilles heel. Despite spending well over $100 million dollars on their Economic Action Plan propaganda campaign, the Harper Conservatives made one truly idiotic mistake. They forgot to buy the website EconomicActionPlan.ca. So we did :)

For the past 4 months I’ve been working with a network of 20+ artists, activists and researchers to produce our own version of the Economic Action Plan campaign. *We’ve created a website that IMHO is better than their actual site and we’ve got 3 brand new 30 second TV ads with voiceover from Paul Hartman (brother of legendary Canadian comedian Phil Hartman!)*

Our EconomicActionPlan.ca campaign has cost less than 0.00005% as much as the Conservatives’—but it contains 100% more facts.

With your help we hope to take over TV sets across the country this summer. If just a thousand of us chip in $10, we can air our first ad during primetime on CBC World Cup Coverage on July 1st!

Check it out here.