Do we like Rick Mercer?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Years of speaking up for gay kids, a malaria charity and kind-hearted satire, with nothing harmful found in what we could reach.
Rick Mercer grew up in Middle Cove, just outside St. John's, one of four kids, with a dad in the fisheries and a mum who was a nurse. He was writing plays and running a comedy troupe as a teenager, and by his early twenties he had national attention. He joined This Hour Has 22 Minutes in 1993 and stayed eight seasons, and his Talking to Americans special pulled 2.7 million viewers.
From 2004 he fronted his own weekly show, which became The Rick Mercer Report and ran until 2018. Along the way he made trips to visit Canadian troops in Bosnia and Kabul, and he picked up a Canadian Armed Forces commendation for supporting peacekeepers. That's a long way from a bloke who only does gags.
Now the harm check. In 2011, after the death of an Ottawa teen, he used a rant to call out schools and to urge gay public figures to be visible role models. In 2025 he said his tour wasn't built to bag Americans, with the line “In order for Canada to be good, Denmark doesn't have to be bad.” We found nothing harmful in his own words, nor any dodgy company he keeps. We found nothing from him on trans issues either way, so that part is a gap, not a tick.
The nearest he's come to a stoush lately was in 2019, when a Conservative riding association in Burnaby shared a meme pairing a real 2011 Mercer rant with the words “Vote Conservative”. He tweeted “Not true. All fake. Please Stop.” The party said the local association, not the campaign, shared it, and the post was deleted. That's him being misused, not him doing wrong.
On how he does satire, he told the Globe and Mail in 2009, after a Fox late-night show mocked the Canadian army chief and joked about invading Canada, that satire has to tell the truth. That fits the whole career: he pokes at the powerful and his famous street-interview bit mostly made fools of the system, not the people in it.
The real stuff: in 2006 he co-founded Spread the Net with Belinda Stronach, raising money for malaria bed nets. By 2013 more than 500 schools had joined its student challenge, with close to 563,000 nets delivered across five African countries. He's also collected a Governor General's Performing Arts Award, the King Clancy Award and a stack of honorary doctorates.