With the Canadian federal election coming up on October 19th, there’s been no shortage of political advertisements, both from the parties themselves and from community members and organizations. In particular, Canada has seen the emergence of a strong anti-Harper movement, with organizations and individuals telling us not who to vote for, but rather who not to vote for. One of the most prominent of these campaigns is by the website Shit Harper Did (SHD), which just yesterday released a comedic documentary called Whoa Canada which uses the stories of various individuals, among other tools, to discuss “Canada’s surveillance programs in an era of climate change,” according to their facebook event page.
The documentary highlights a number of personal narratives: the story of a relative of one of the film makers in the Philippines who lost her home because of climate change, an indigenous woman introduced as “a woman who cares about kids” who was subject to lengthy and elaborate government surveillance, another indigenous woman speaking about her experience in a residential school, and a man who fled political persecution in Zimbabwe only to be arrested in Canada for participating in a peaceful protest.
These narratives are what kept my attention when watching Whoa Canada. Though advertised as a comedic documentary, comedy was never used when telling these stories. They were meant to evoke sympathy, not laughter.
The power of life narratives is not only used by SHD. I decided to look through the Conservative party website and came across a page with the pictures and short bios of all Conservative candidates. Most bios included the mention of how many kids they had, where they grew up, and other information that had little to do with politics.
Life narratives appear everywhere, even in conversations about the upcoming election and who to vote for. When a visit to a party website tells you that the Conservative candidate for your riding is the mother of three and went to the same high school you graduated from, does that humanize her? Does it make you more likely to vote for her? I’d argue that it does, in the same way that watching a documentary about people who tell you how negatively a certain political party (or person) has affected their lives makes you less likely to vote for that party.
Who wins an election has to do with much more than who tells the most resonant or sympathetic story, but it is clear that even in politics names and faces carry a great deal of power, and that this power is being utilized in a variety of different ways. How much these narratives effect who we support and who we vote for, I don’t know, but I would like to find out.