Gaiaisi
Gaiaisi

Musicians Imagine A Canada Without Harper

The Globe & Mail Saturday edition featured a lengthy article about the #ImagineOct20th initiative that has spawned a growing number of concerts across the country and is calling for a change in Conservative rule and promoting a reversal of electoral apathy.

At the same time, many provincial newspapers carried a Canadian Press story authored by Nick Patch that asked the question, 'If Canadian musicians don't support Stephen Harper, why aren't they writing songs about him?'

It's a fair question. New Pornographers' Carl Newman is quoted in the CP story as saying “maybe a lot of musicians are hesitant to write something that’s so specific to a time and place,” and Dan Boeckner from the band Operators as obliquely responds to the question by suggesting that "it’s easier for American bands to write about a bad president than it is for Canadians to write about a bad prime minister, because we have less of a global impact... It’s not going to resonate as much as saying Bush is terrible. People in France will be like, ‘Stephen Harper who?’ ”

Maybe so, but the train has left the station and the question has been raised, the ImagineOct20th concerts are going ahead and not everyone is sitting quietly strumming silence is golden.

Toronto entertainer and recent FACTOR recipient Gaiaisi has used guerilla tactics to generate material for "Canadian Revolution" —a song video he has captioned as "a musical assault on Harper’s policies, as well as a diversely-illustrated effort to bring attention to under-represented election issues like climate change, poverty in Canada, and a push for proportional representation at the ballot box."

No shrinking violet, Gaiaisi writes on YouTube: "As of 2014 there were officially more Canadians employed in the Green Energy Sector than in the chemically hazardous, highly carcinogenic, toxic work site that is the Tar Sands. If you don’t believe me look it up. And that’s after nine years of the Conservative government doing almost nothing to help advance clean energy in Canada (much of the growth is thanks to foreign investment, and intelligent decisions at the provincial level) and pumping billions of taxpayer dollars into an industry that is literally incompatible with maintaining an inhabitable planet, causing cancer in downstream communities, and is not even profitable at current oil prices, a major reason Canada is now in a recession. Just imagine what this country could be with a responsible government that listened to both environmental scientists, economists, and the majority of Canadians who never voted for Harper in the first place."

Nuff said about what he has to say. Here's his video. You tell us what you think!

 

 

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