In Saturday’s episode of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Mark Critch (left) rolls up Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s rim by asking how he might bring his private sector experience to bear on running the country.CBC/Supplied
For the first time in its 32 seasons, This Hour Has 22 Minutes has put together a stand-alone federal election special.
Like the recent French-language leaders’ debate, however, the Canadian comedy staple is playing second fiddle to the country’s foremost national passion.
On Saturday night, whenever the Leafs-Senators playoff game ends, CBC will throw to the 44-minutes episode, called Vote Canadian.
If there aren’t an exhausting number of overtime periods, it’s well worth staying tuned to watch 22 Minutes veteran Mark Critch’s perfectly executed one-on-one roasts of most of the federal leaders. (The special’s already available to stream on CBC Gem.)
Over a coffee in a Tim Hortons, Critch rolls up Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s rim by asking how he might bring his private sector experience to bear on running the country: “Do you want to save some money by incorporating Canada in the Cayman Islands?”
Sitting down with Jagmeet Singh on his campaign bus, Critch brings up former NDP leader Tom Mulcair’s recent comments about how party faithful should vote Liberal this election: “Is this the bus he threw you under?”
In another segment, the Green Party’s Elizabeth May and Jonathan Pedneault get – in the parlance of the internet – absolutely destroyed by Critch: “What’s your goal this election? Is it to get more seats than leaders this time?”
If it is a surprise to you (as it was to me) that 22 Minutes has never made an election special before, it’s likely because the show has been on the air during many of them.
In fact, the fake news show spun out of CODCO was born during a momentous election campaign.
The first episode aired Oct. 11, 1993, a couple of weeks before the dramatic end of a decade-long reign of the Progressive Conservative party.
That fevered year in Canadian history was also the last time one of our teams (the Montreal Canadiens) won the Stanley Cup – and the last time that voter turnout for a federal election topped 70 per cent.
If advance voting and the NHL standings are any indication, 2025 could very well be a throwback to that year.
But one thing different in 1993 is that CBC had a variety of satirical and topical TV comedy shows for different tastes.
If 22 Minutes’ selling point was the outsider perspective and biting humour of its Newfoundlander cast, the Royal Canadian Air Farce – a radio staple that launched its long-running foray into television that same fall – was more of a spoof of the Laurentian Consensus from within by Central Canadian comedians.
At the time, CBC was also still experimenting with a weekly talk show called Friday Night! with Ralph Benmergui; Google the episode where comedian Scott Thompson and hockey commentator Don Cherry cuddle up on the host’s couch.
Thompson was then still on CBC, too, as part of the hipper, younger sketch show Kids in the Hall. It was more concerned with social than political satire, which is why their bits still get laughs in a way old Rick Mercer rants or Luba Goy’s impression of Sheila Copps can’t.
On the now relatively denuded CBC comedy landscape, 22 Minutes is left to appeal to all kinds of Canadian viewers interested in sketch and satire. Heck, it even added KITH’s Mark McKinney as a guest player to incarnate Carney late this season. (His best appearance was on last week’s season finale in a spoof of the Liberal ad with Mike Myers.)
While its recent seasons have seen renewed popularity and many killer sketches go viral, the strain of being English-language Canada’s The Daily Show and SNL and occasionally a talk show with musical guests all wrapped up in one is sometimes apparent. (The election special ends with Glass Tiger’s Alan Frew singing a patriotic ditty.) Critch, who’s been with the show since 2002 and most channels its original spirit, has the chops do the political interviews, deliver rants that rank up there with ex-cast member Mercer’s (his one about Wayne Gretzky this season was *chef’s kiss*) and nail a sketch even while upside down (as he did playing the captain of the Delta flight that flipped in Toronto).
The rest of the cast are talented but less versatile.
Trent McClellan, another Newfoundlander and long-time cast member, is a gentler presence – even when he’s smashing pictures of Donald Trump and Elon Musk with a crowbar in a Halifax rage room as seen in Vote Canadian.
The newer cast members are more in his mode. Aba Amuquandoh, Chris Wilson and Stacey McGunnigle all hail from Ontario or B.C. – and excel most in the sketch sphere.
This means the news desk one-liners the show is built around don’t quite land as they used to do.
During its hiatus, 22 Minutes might want to think about who could join the cast to put some edge back into those headlines – or to consider rejigging the format.
As for Vote Canadian, you get one guess which mainstream federal party isn’t represented by a leader or an MP.
Pierre Poilievre isn’t afraid of a joke: He submitted to ritual humiliation on the Radio-Canada comedy show Infoman in December. But the very existence of 22 Minutes shows that his reasoning behind defunding the English-language CBC just doesn’t stand up. Love it or loathe it, there’s no competitors on private networks or streamers spoofing our news and mocking our politicians.
