On Location: Quebec

Throughout “My Internship in Canada” (2015), protagonist Souverain (Irdens Exantus) Skypes his friends and family back home in Haiti to report on how his internship for Steve Guibord, a French Canadian Member of Parliament, is going. To his friends and family, who have experienced a number of regime changes and other vestiges of the corruption stereotypically ascribed to such Caribbean governments, Souverain’s reports grow a large, interested audience.

By the final Skype session, the contingent asking Souverain’s questions has grown from his mother and brother to virtually his whole hometown. Eventually, director Phillipe Falardeau attempts to suggest that viewers are meant to count themselves among those wondering what really sets the government of a country like Haiti so drastically apart from a more “advanced” government like that of Canada.

Falardeau’s smart and at times very funny political satire film premiered at Locarno in 2015 and has attracted warm praise on the festival circuit since then. In the film, Steve Guibord, a former Quebecer hockey star (Patrick Huard), rides his popularity to an Independent Parliamentary seat in his hometown in the far-flung, heavily forested northern part of Quebec. Steve normally faces local disputes with the mayor of a nearby town that competes with him for business and tourism, and his biggest disputes usually involve rows between First Nations people and logging companies. However, Steve’s world is turned upside-down when he becomes the swing vote on a decision that will ultimately decide whether Canada sends its armed forces to an unnamed Middle Eastern conflict, and a sea of concerned citizens and lobbying groups from across the nation descend on him to try to woo him to their side.

Falardeau’s humor and wit feel very prescient in the wake of the recent U.S. election, as Steve bumbles his way throughout the entire political process. As an Independent MP who was elected based on his local popularity, as is constantly (and humorously) referenced, Steve has rarely brought his focus outside of the corner of Quebec that he occupies. He is exasperated by all the undue stress his status as a swing voter affords him, having before been almost entirely a passenger in the Canadian government. In one of the film’s most humorous scenes, Steve remarks that he knows almost nothing about Ottawa, the capital city where he supposedly spends half of his time.

As the film follows Steve’s farcical reelection campaign in the midst of these issues, Souverain’s bubbly, upbeat attitude repeatedly annoys the former hockey star. However, he eventually must realize the truth: that Souverain has far more knowledge of the inner workings of politics than he does. As Souverain’s contingent of friends comes to realize, it is just as possible for someone like Steve to skate by in politics in Canada as it is in Haiti.