Local comedian Kevin Lee (you might remember him from the the first Sad Comedy Show!) answers Michelle Reid’s questions about Shit Harper Did, a brilliant push to defeat voter apathy through a combination of humour and cold, hard facts. Margaret Atwood tweeted about it so you know it’s good. Tomorrow, May 2nd, is the general election, and if you’re feeling undecided, visit Shit Harper Did and get informed.

Michelle Reid: Who are the mas­ter­minds behind Shit Harper Did?

Kevin Lee: We are a col­lec­tion of Van­cou­ver film­mak­ers, come­di­ans, actors, activists and artists inter­ested in remind­ing peo­ple why Cana­dian pol­i­tics should mat­ter to Cana­di­ans. You know, obvi­ous stuff.

MR: Did you do a lot of research before launch­ing the site or were you all pretty well-versed in the shit Harper has done?

KL: There was plenty of shit that sat, still steam­ing, right on the sur­face (e.g. con­tempt of Par­lia­ment), and other shit that had to be dug up (e.g. cuts to women’s advo­cacy) and plenty of shit that was handed to us in lit­tle plas­tic bag­gies by the peo­ple who sup­ported the site. Shit party!

MR: Are you find­ing that a lot of peo­ple were unaware of just how ter­ri­ble he is, or does the pop­u­lar­ity indi­cate that a lot of peo­ple have been unhappy with the gov­ern­ment for awhile?

KL: A bit of both. The news cycle moves so quickly and is pitched at such a dull drone that most peo­ple either miss or ignore these things. That and the politi­cians are experts at dou­bling the drone so no one cares any­more about their expla­na­tion of their con­tro­ver­sial or plain hor­ri­ble deci­sions.

Also, many peo­ple hear some­thing Harper did that they don’t agree with, add a drop to “dis­like Harper” bucket and for­get it. These peo­ple end up being unhappy with Harper, but not know­ing why, they just accept that they don’t like him and so they can often feel unmo­ti­vated to do any­thing about it.

Both groups found some­thing ben­e­fi­cial out of our web­site which we feel pierced the drone with com­edy (and, yes, pro­fan­ity), and served up a plate of hot steam­ing facts. I real­ize I might’ve con­jured the image of hot shit on a plat­ter, and I’m okay with that, because that’s what it is.

MR: Any response from Harper responders?

KL: On the first day of the website’s launch, crash, and sub­se­quent relaunch, I made the mis­take of delv­ing into the locus of all Intel­li­gent Dis­course known as YouTube com­ments, and boy howdy I learned never to do that. But sev­eral Harper sup­port­ers would occa­sion­ally post to the Face­book page and stir up dis­cus­sion and that’s all part of the healthy demo­c­ra­tic dia­logue, no mat­ter how much name-calling and child­ish vit­riol get spread around by both sides. Peo­ple are talk­ing? Good.

The Geor­gia Strait implied (and then retracted!) that Shit Harper Did was an ad agency stunt. Have you encoun­tered any other skep­ti­cism about the moti­va­tions behind the site?

There seem to be a few peo­ple with the impres­sion that we’re some sort of com­pany, run­ning focus groups and call­ing cast­ing agents to pop­u­late the videos. Oth­ers claim we’re a Lib­eral con­spir­acy unit. If we were launch­ing the site today (the week­end before Elec­tion Day) those same peo­ple would be call­ing us an NDP con­spir­acy unit. Really we’re just a bunch of scruffy hip­sters who started a band, and our band web­site, which fea­tured a few facts about Harper, blew up, so we just went with that instead.

MR: Where do the ideas for the videos come from?

KL: So many videos of celebri­ties urg­ing youth do to some­thing. Why should we believe them more than the youth themselves?

Also, Air Bud 4: Sev­enth Inning Fetch.

MR: Who did that draw­ing of Harper hold­ing a kit­ten? Why does it scare me?

KL: Because he has that look, you know, the look. Like you just walked in the room and he was hunched in the cor­ner, lips smack­ing and talk­ing like Gol­lum and you acci­den­tally knock a book off a desk and he spins around hold­ing the tiny kit­ten, smil­ing like noth­ing was up. You just leave the book on the floor and back out of the room slowly, and back all way to your near­est voting place.

Check out Shit Harper Did here. And don’t forget to vote, Monday, May 2nd!