Politics & Power Quote by Rick Mercer

Nobody says "the reality is" like someone about to puncture a polite fiction. Mercer, a comedian who made a career out of treating Canadian politics as both civic duty and national sport, frames media and party power as a closed dinner party: a few networks, a few parties, the same chairs, the same menu, the same people deciding what counts as news. The joke is that it barely needs a punchline. When the table is that small, the outcome is structurally predetermined: someone gets carved up.

The intent is less partisan than procedural. Mercer is pointing at the bargain underneath campaign coverage and leaders debates: access traded for predictability, airtime traded for discipline, questions negotiated into harmlessness. "At the table" is doing heavy lifting. It suggests governance-by-invitation, where legitimacy comes not from voters but from being included in the mediated conversation. That’s the subtext: if politics is staged inside a narrow media ecosystem, the public becomes audience rather than participant.

"Victim" sharpens the cynicism. It’s not an abstract "loser" in a negotiation; it’s a casualty of consolidation. Maybe it’s smaller parties iced out by format rules, maybe it’s journalists pressured into horse-race framing, maybe it’s voters fed a simplified script because complexity doesn’t fit broadcast rhythms. Mercer’s comedy has always treated Canadian politeness as camouflage for power. Here, he’s naming the polite version of collusion: not a conspiracy, just a system that makes betrayal inevitable, because too few players control the microphone.