On national Canadian radio, it boiled down to one thing: The Royal Canadian Air Farce, which began on the CBC in 1973. It was such a success on radio that a TV version was put together a number of years later.
Canada is a country of regions. Toronto is not Vancouver and neither of them are Calgary or Halifax. They all have distinct cultures. About the only thing national that’s able to be satirised is either the CBC or federal politics. So the Air Farce had people impersonating various prime ministers and other political figures in Ottawa.
One member of the troupe invented his own.
Dave Broadfoot was, unlike the rest of the Air Farce troupe, from the West Coast, born in North Vancouver. Being Canadian, he did parodied some national stereotypes—a hockey player, a Mountie and a federal politician. And like Vancouver stage actors Fletcher Markle, Paul Kligman and Peg Dixon, and radio fixture Alan Young, Broadfoot decided to further his career by moving to Toronto. By December 1952, he was doing what amounted to a stand-up routine on CBLT’s Big Revue (the Globe and Mail’s Alex Barris compared him to Will Shriner). His career was slightly interrupted when he went overseas to entertain troops during the Korean War.
Let’s fast-forward to 1977. This feature story appeared July 6th in the Ottawa Journal and gives you a bit of an idea of Broadfoot’s head space.
MP for Kicking Horse Pass an idealist
By Peter Robb
Special to the Journal
Would you believe comedian Dave Broadfoot has three sisters who are missionaries? Or that he has worked in the St. Vincent de Paul prison north of Montreal doing volunteer work for the inmates?
To most of us Broadfoot is the creator of the characters Corporal Renfrew of the Mounties and the member of parliament for the riding of Kicking Horse Pass. However, there is another side to the man—one that is intensely idealistic.
In an interview this week after his Camp Fortune performance, Broadfoot discussed his career, his thoughts on the business he is in and the country he lives in. His career has spanned 25 years of hard work, almost all of it in Canada.
Broadfoot started his career in Vancouver in the late 1940s.
But straight drama frustrated him. Broadfoot wanted to do comedy and he began to develop an act.
“In those days everybody had an act. It was the only way to do comedy. Nowadays no one does things that way, they talk about their wives or their old neighbourhood, but no one has an act worked out. Not many modern comedians can come out and relate directly to an audience, it is just not the way things are done.”
Strongly influenced by the last gasps of vaudeville, Broadfoot developed a stand-up comedy routine based on the characters he saw around him. He did office parties and banquets for a couple of years to polish his act and then he made the big move to Toronto. He began his television and radio career in 1952. Out of his first appearance on television came his most famous character, MP for Kicking Horse Pass.
"I had been watching the Republican convention of 1952 and I was amazed by the rhetoric of the whole event. Out of that came a prototype of the member for Kicking Horse Pass. But it needed a Canadian flavor, so I patterned him after E.C. Manning, who was then the premier for Alberta. He had that evangelical style of speaking that made him easy to caricature. All I had to do then was give the character a riding. Mavor Moore suggested the Kicking Horse Pass and that stuck."
Broadfoot's many years in the business has given him strong views on his fellow performers.
"There are many performers that just sit back and collect their money. I do not believe in that, for example I still do benefit shows while many performers do not.
"For a performer to be successful he has to possess intellectual curiosity. So many performers, even the biggest, lack that. There is just nothing to them.
"That is why I enjoy working with Roger Abbott and Don Ferguson and the rest of the Air Farce cast. There we are all writers as well as comedians and it is so stimulating to work with creative people like these."
Broadfoot is also moved by injustices that he sees around him. His latest act contains references to Anita Bryant and her crusade against homosexuals. He sees this as hypocritical.
"The self-righteousness that these people come on with is, well, let's just say that I think it is vengeful for the wrong reasons.
"I worked at the St. Vincent de Paul prison near Montreal when I was working a lot in Montreal, doing comedy workshops and the like for the prisoners, and how anyone could wish that anyone, including homosexuals, could be locked up in any prison is horrendous."
Finally he commented on Canada and why he has never left.
"I am intense about Canada. I am a nationalist one that firmly believes that you have to look after your home before you can help the rest of the world. "I have worked in the U.S. and in Great Britain and I have never really felt comfortable. The homesickness that I feel for Canada is absolutely extraordinary.
"That is not to say that I am pleased with the Canadian situation, especially in English Canada. English Canadians watch American television, listen to American music and retire to Florida to escape Quebec and they wonder why our country is in sad shape. I think that it is sad."
Broadfoot was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1983. He was 90 when he died on November 1, 2016. Location unknown. Somewhere in Canada would be the only appropriate spot.
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